Contradictory Indianness: Indenture, Creolization, and Literary Imaginary 9781978829138

Citation preview

Contradictory Indianness •

CRITICAL CA ­R IB­B EAN STUDIES Series Editors: Yolanda Martínez-­San Miguel, Car­ter Mathes, and Kathleen López Editorial Board: Carlos U. Decena, Rutgers University; Alex Dupuy, Wesleyan University; Aisha Khan, New York University; April J. Mayes, Pomona College; Patricia Mohammed, University of West Indies; Martin Munro, Florida State University; F. Nick Nesbitt, Prince­ton University; Michelle Stephens, Rutgers University; Deborah Thomas, University of Pennsylvania; and Lanny Thompson, University of Puerto Rico Focused particularly in the twentieth and twenty-­ first centuries, although ­attentive to the context of ­earlier eras, this series encourages interdisciplinary approaches and methods and is open to scholarship in a variety of areas, including anthropology, cultural studies, diaspora and transnational studies, environmental studies, gender and sexuality studies, history, and sociology. The series pays par­t ic­u ­lar attention to the four main research clusters of Critical Ca­rib­ bean Studies at Rutgers University, where the coeditors serve as members of the executive board: Ca­rib­bean Critical Studies Theory and the Disciplines; Archipelagic Studies and Creolization; Ca­rib­bean Aesthetics, Poetics, and Politics; and Ca­rib­bean Colonialities. For a list of all the titles in the series, please see the last page of the book.

Contradictory Indianness • Indenture, Creolization, and Literary Imaginary

At r e y e e P h u k a n

Rutgers U niversity Press New Bru nswick, Camden, and Newark, New Jersey, and London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Phukan, Atreyee, author. Title: Contradictory Indianness : indenture, creolization, and literary imaginary / Atreyee Phukan. Description: New Brunswick, NJ : Rutgers University Press, [2022] | Series: C ­ ritical Caribbean studies | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021045681 | ISBN 9781978829107 (paperback) | ISBN 9781978829114 (hardback) | ISBN 9781978829121 (epub) | ISBN 9781978829138 (pdf) Subjects: LCSH: Caribbean fiction (English)—East Indian authors—History and criticism. | Caribbean fiction (English)—20th century—History and criticism. | East Indian diaspora in literature. | East Indians in literature. | LCGFT: Literary criticism. Classification: LCC PR9205.4 .P48 2022 | DDC 813/.54098914110729—dc23/eng/20220307 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021045681 A British Cataloging-­in-­Publication rec­ord for this book is available from the British Library. Copyright © 2022 by Atreyee Phukan All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is “fair use” as defined by U.S. copyright law. References to internet websites (URLs) ­were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Rutgers University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared. The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—­Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992. www​.­rutgersuniversitypress​.­org Manufactured in the United States of Amer­i­ca

 For my teachers who, in friendship, lifted me, and, in sharing, forever opened my world.

Contents

Introduction ​ ​ 1

1 Indenture Passage and Poetics in Totaram Sanadhya and LalBihari Sharma ​ ​ 49



2 Repatriation and the “Indian Prob­lem” in Ismith Khan’s The Jumbie Bird (1960) ​ ​ 71



3 The Trope of the Rice Field in Harold Sonny Ladoo’s No Pain Like This Body (1972) ​ ​ 100



4 (En)Gendering Indenture in Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night (1992) ​ ​ 131

Conclusion ​ ​ 156 Acknowl­edgments ​ ​  171 Notes ​ ​ 175 Bibliography ​ ​ ​203 Index ​ ​ 221

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Introduction So that my Odyssey and my voyages as a coolie ­w ill not sink into vacuity, I launch my cargo of stars ­towards nascent horizons. —­Khal Torabully, Cale d’Etoiles Coolitude

As Contradictory Indianness endeavors to show, a postcolonial Ca­rib­bean aesthetic that has from its inception privileged inclusivity, interraciality, and re­sis­tance against Old World colonial ­orders requires taking into account Indo-­Caribbean writers and their reimagining of Indianness in the region. Their contributions would shed light on alternative narratives of creolization, in which a poetic re­sis­tance against the Old World o ­ rders of India marks the entry, rather than strangeness, of Indo-­Caribbean symbology into the Ca­r ib­bean literary canon. Whereas, for instance, forms of Indo-­Caribbean cultural expression in ­music (e.g., chutney and soca chutney),1 cuisine (e.g., roti or dal puri), or religion (e.g., Hindu Ramleela and Phagwa, and Muslim Hosay festivals) are more readily received as creolizing (thus, Ca­rib­be­anizing) pro­cesses, an Indo-­Caribbean literary imaginary has rarely been studied as such. The glaring absence of studies attending to Indo-­Caribbean literary expression as similarly invested in the aesthetics of creolization has, however inadvertently, ghettoized all fiction written by Indo-­Caribbeans in a distinct tautology: Only the most internationally famous Indo-­Caribbean writer is known outside the Ca­rib­be­an; only such internationally successful writing provides any win­dow into Indo-­Caribbean literary expression and cultural identity; and only narratives (predominantly Hindu, cosmopolitan, and patriarchal) that are published, read, and critically analyzed become the sine qua non authority on Indo-­Caribbean cultural worlds. To suggest, as I do, that an indenture poetics is engendered from specifically Ca­rib­be­anist forms of cultural creolization, rather than deviant “South Asian” forms, underscores the ever-­present and merely overlooked dynamism of cultural exchange between Indian and African cultural worlds regionally in the Ca­rib­bean and the transnational formation of diverse Indian identities brought together u ­ nder the shadow of colonial indenture. Contradictory Indianness suggests that the constant evolution of Indo-­Caribbean lit­er­a­ture is appreciable 1

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not only by opening up the field of texts that are studied but by demo­ cratizing the lenses used to study (all) Ca­rib­bean texts. Reading Indo-­Caribbean writing within the par­ameters of creolization’s aesthetics outlines the always extant, and merely hidden, contrapuntal nature of Indo-­Caribbean literary imaginary, its parallelisms with dominant (Afro)Ca­rib­bean literary and theoretical trends, and its discreteness from dominant (South Asian) Indian discourse. Reading Indo-­Caribbean literary imaginary as (always) creolized, as I propose, moreover challenges the protocolonialist idea that indenture cultural knowledge evolves only insofar as it continues to cherish and sustain an Indianness anchored to the cultural hegemony of the ancestral mainland, and thus separate from the pro­cesses of hybridization and innovation associated with major Ca­rib­bean cultural groups, such that the term “Indo-­Caribbean” is as well viewed and treated as a static and/or homogeneous category. Rather, the ­angle of enquiry I propose privileges the imaginative power of literary expression (e.g., narrative experimentation and innovation) and anticolonial aesthetics (e.g., contradiction and ambivalence) to push against the double limitation often imposed on studies of Indo-­Caribbean lit­er­a­ture, that is, the view that such fiction, precisely as exotic, foreign, or prototype, is appreciable primarily for its socio-­documentative capacity. As such, Contradictory Indianness argues that an Indo-­Caribbean literary imaginary has been and is in constant engagement with, rather than separate from, the regional and transnational poetics of the Ca­r ib­bean canon. In that vein, this book deviates from studies that approach literary creolization as a singularly Afro-­Caribbean endeavor to argue that creolization has been critically impor­tant to the development of an Indo-­Caribbean literary imaginary. More specifically, I contend, the logic of contradiction in creolization poetics makes explicit Indo-­Caribbean authors’ appropriation of dominant Ca­rib­bean signifiers to articulate the “arrival” of an emergent voice in Ca­rib­bean lit­er­a­ture and of an emerging po­liti­cal consciousness during the critical years following decolonization and in­de­pen­dence. A literary imaginary grounded in redetermining indenture passage, i.e., kala pani (black ­waters), and history as one of continuous negotiation and re­sis­tance, as I ­w ill argue, pointedly subverts the often-­ overlooked legacy of double exclusion experienced by a group viewed within the Ca­rib­bean as temporary interlopers during indenture and as sociocultural outsiders even a­ fter indenture’s termination (in 1917), and by ancestral India as contaminated social outcastes. I also suggest that the aesthetics of creolization has been particularly critical to Indo-­Caribbean writers’ reimagining of Indianness through a recycling of the colonial ste­reo­t ypes of the kala pani mi­grant as the pejorative “coolie,” which, by extension, challenges the ancestral and hegemonic perception of kala pani passage as absolute annihilation and pollution. A literary imaginary valued for its distinctive and alternative perspective on

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exile, passage, and plantation ­labor would thus also lend greater visibility to the uniqueness of a (post)indenture poetics forged within its own global south diasporas across the Ca­rib­bean, Indian Ocean islands, and South Africa. This ­angle of approach shifts away from the usual framework in which both indenture migration and (post)indenture cultural evolution are perceived as negotiations anchored to India, and which proscribe the possibility of studying indenture in its own diasporic formation. This is ostensibly Indo-­Mauritian poet Khal Torabully’s suggestion in the epigraph of this introduction: that it is still ­toward distant “horizons” only just coming into existence that a “coolie”2 finds his or her way out from oblivion. Rather than recycling the ancestral notion of the sea as abyss, Torabully argues that “Coolitude,”3 as a revisionary aesthetics of “coolie” migration, offers new theoretical and poetic frameworks for the study of indenture culture and history that “explores the concept of the ocean as . . . ​a space for destruction of identity, yet also one of regeneration, when an aesthetics of migration was created.” 4 This under-­studied but critically impor­tant approach to Indo-­Caribbean lit­ er­a­ture endeavors by extension to underscore the transgressive role of the imaginary as a form of “knowledge becoming” (in Glissant’s sense of thought itself always en route) that affords writers and their readers new ways to view Indo-­ Caribbean cultural expression and innovation outside the conventional frameworks and paradigms in which they have been typically placed. This imaginary is foremost anticolonial, as I ­will show, by its challenge to both the colonialist framing of the indenture person as a transient interloper and the ancestral conception of indenture passage as pollution; it is furthermore anti-­caste in its centering of the perspective and experience of a group condemned to “castelessness” ­because of their passage across the kala pani and away from the erstwhile motherland. Habitually viewed as the lowliest of classes with l­ittle to no po­liti­cal power, indenture Indian mi­grants literally touched the untouchable terrain of the kala pani, and seized on the imaginary as part of their right to negotiate the very meaning of Indianness. Indenture passage, while undoubtedly characterized by systemic abuses as one other iteration of “imperial l­abor reallocation” in the nineteenth c­ entury, was thus also the locus of a radical new consciousness in which ancestral proscriptions regarding exile and overseas migration ­were revised and overturned by a group conventionally viewed by the mainland as peripheral and nominal to the exercise of imagining the contours of being and belonging as Indian. 5 In this effort, I am indebted to the works of a host of intellectuals and artists who have made it pos­si­ble to commit indenture to radically new forms of scholarship that w ­ ere only a few de­cades ago considered unthinkable. Particularly as this work is concerned with shifting the ways in which Indo-­Caribbean lit­er­a­t ure and cultural history have previously been received in academia, my analy­sis places theorists and writers of indenture

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s­ tudies, such as Khal Torabully, Patricia Mohammed, Joy Mahabir, Mariam Pirbhai, Marina Car­ter, Clem Seecharan, Brinsley Samaroo, and Brij Lal, among many ­others, in conversation with the critical works of founding Ca­rib­bean theorists such as Aimé Césaire, E. Kamau Brathwaite, Édouard Glissant, George Lamming, and Stuart Hall. In the Ca­r ib­bean, the long-­standing repre­sen­ta­t ion of indenture cultural expression as anti-­creolization has been premised on the assumption that Indian cultural traits crystallized ­after migration in opposition to the view that Africanist (mainstream) cultures underwent significant and continual transformation. This binarism has promoted the study of Indian cultural evolution and experience in the Ca­rib­bean as traditionally “particularistic” as opposed to the “universalistic” ideology of African culture.6 In this framework, presumptions about Indian identity as fossilized and static did not take into consideration the ­great diversity in ways that Indians actually existed, both regionally and internally within the group, depending on profession and cultural worldview. In Ca­rib­bean Masala, Dave Ramsaran and Linden Lewis make the impor­tant point that while the “creole model” does ultimately help us to see more commonalities than differences between Indian communities in Guyana and Trinidad, it is “misleading to describe the Indo-­Guyanese as merely rural residents, untouched by notions of modernity,” as is typically assumed.7 And even in Trinidad, the grouping of rural Indians as a single unit did not take into account the fact that rural Indians in the sugar-­belt villages ­were dramatically distinct from ­t hose in the south where Presbyterian missionaries from Canada (who began arriving in the nineteenth c­ entury) provided more exposure to Creole values of the city and, subsequently, allowed this group of Indians more ave­nues socially. Hugely influential studies in the social sciences, such as Morton Klass’s East Indians in Trinidad: A Study of Cultural Per­sis­tence (1961) and Lloyd Braithwaite’s Social Stratification in Trinidad (1953), Daniel Segal argues, applied a “fundamentally objectivist or realist understanding of the restricted sense of creole” that led ­t hese early writers to assume the outlier position of Indians.8 As Segal suggests, though the concept Creole ­counters so-­called purer races, ­because ­t hese same pure races proscribe the mixing assumed of Creole identities and cultures “the social circulation of creole has maintained, rather than contested, the very idea of essentialized racial identities.”9 Put another way, whereas Afro-­Caribbean Creole identity is viewed as hybrid(izing) against the Euro-­American colonizer ­imagined as w ­ hole and pure, the indenture, being neither African, Eu­ro­pean, nor American, has conventionally been seen as non-­Creole, nonnative, and, even, antihybrid. Pro­cesses of cultural creolization even in Trinidad and Guyana, which consist of the largest Indian populations in the anglophone Ca­rib­bean, are rarely assumed as being inherently changed by Indo-­Caribbean cultural influences; rather, African Creole culture is perceived as porous and protean and Indian cul-

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ture as peripheral. Indeed, the “negotiation of “Indianness” ” in the Ca­rib­bean context, as Ramasaran and Lewis argue, has tended to always depend on the contradictory pulls between South Asian constructs of Indian cultural “purity” and “the extent to which [Indianness] is a reflection of compromise within the local situation,” so that Indian Ca­rib­be­a nness has always to exist as “distinct [and] dif­fer­ent” at the same time.10 In the Ca­rib­bean, Patricia Mohammed points to the specific paradox that for “Asians and, in par­tic­u ­lar, the Indian community, issues of continued alienation or a sense of unbelonging are assumed not to exist” despite the commonplace perception that “the East Indian population is peripheral or strange” to the region.11 More generally throughout the geography of the indenture system, the indenture l­ abor immigrant has historically been perceived as a “lackey of capitalism [. . .] Long stigmatized from the fact of having taken over the reins from slavery, and of having thus been complicit, albeit involuntarily, in the perpetuation of a colonial form of society ­after the abolition of slavery, the Indian immigrant has been at one and the same time a despised foreign and fundamentally excluded.”12 By extension, it could be said that the study of Indo-­Caribbean lit­er­a­ture has suffered a reduction of its literary imaginary by conventions that have underscored its quasi-­exotic and anomalous qualities, despite the fact that the fictions clearly seek to reimagine indenture’s afterlife in the Ca­rib­bean region. The characteristic newness of the “new world,” marked by a heterogeneity that Stuart Hall defines as the very “beginning of diaspora, of diversity, of hybridity and difference [which] makes Afro-­Caribbean ­people already p ­ eople of a diaspora”,13 has, moreover, seldom been the critical framework applied in studying Indo-­ Caribbeans as “already” of a diaspora or to appreciate Indo-­Caribbean cultural expression and innovation as similarly invested in the “beginnings” of its own distinctiveness precisely as diasporic. I suggest that ­t hese types of double exclusions have in fact been instrumental to redeterminations of indenture passage and indenture cultural transformation as pro­cesses of continuous negotiation and re­sis­tance transculturally and transnationally, with India at the periphery. This double exclusionary feature informs what I call the “contradictory Indianness” of indenture poetics, that is, the paradox of being, belonging, and becoming in ways that have had to navigate and reinterpret the indenture’s historical positionality as other and interloper within two dominant and competing frameworks (i.e., the South Asian and Ca­rib­bean). In that vein, and as the title of this work demonstrates, Edward Kamau Brathwaite’s foundational rendering of (post)coloniality in the Ca­rib­bean as a “contradictory omen” is key. As a “contradiction” characterized by symbolic and conceptual marronage (or, “runaway”), postcoloniality in Brathwaite’s view is a prolonged pro­cess in which signs of “partial/ambiguous separateness” both articulate and anchor new imaginaries of being and belonging in the afterlives of colonialism.14 This “omen” is specifically contradictory, as in unexpected, in keeping with the historic role of

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marronage as expressive of the agency of the oppressed through “runaway” acts. Contradictory Indianness, at its core, thus argues that the arrival of Indians through indenture and the subsequent rescripting of Indianness in the Caribbean compels us to appreciate the signifying world of indenture passage as engendering its own marronage from the South Asian contexts and to reposition it within, rather than exterior to, creolization’s aesthetic framework, thus placing it alongside the context of innovation and reinvention typically associated with Ca­rib­bean cultural creolization. While the aforementioned inconsistencies may seem to pose obstacles to the line of inquiry proposed h ­ ere, I opt to read them as opportunities for deterritorialized rethinking t­ oward a more inclusive model of creolization that makes room for Indo-­Caribbean lit­er­a­ture as a productive contradiction, i.e., as a literary imaginary that mines the complexities inherent to Indo-­Caribbean forms of belonging, as both Indian and Ca­rib­ bean, in their new worlds. Reinventing the way in which Indo-­Caribbean lit­er­a­ture is read is particularly urgent in the case of a literary body that continues to be studied as a “canon” consisting mostly of two male authors, both Trinidadian. Alison Donnell notes that Indo-­Caribbean writing repeatedly suffers from a practice of “writing off” and Indo-­Caribbean writers “subject to a tradition of underrepre­sen­ta­tion and misinterpretation in the development of Ca­rib­bean literary studies.”15 Undoubtedly, the serial crowning of V.  S. Naipaul, who, among other accolades, was awarded a Nobel Prize, a knighthood, and induction into the Royal Society of Lit­er­a­tures, has done much to obscure dif­fer­ent and competing versions of Indo-­ Caribbean literary expression. It is noteworthy, however, that both V. S. Naipaul the person and his literary oeuvre have had such a peculiar fate in both Ca­rib­bean and South Asian literary studies. One notable example of the way in which Naipaul (and his work) is si­mul­ta­neously included and excluded as “Indian,” specifically, can be found in Salman Rushdie’s introduction to Mirrorwork: Fifty Years of Indian Writing, 1947–1997, in which several paragraphs are spent explaining Naipaul’s absence from the anthology: “ ‘regrettab[le]’ and not of ‘our choice, but . . . ​his own.’ ”16 Rushdie then continues in some detail to summarize Naipaul’s “missing” non-­fictional travelogues, an odd se­lection for the anthology given that the compilation other­wise consists almost entirely of fiction written by resident Indians or NRIs in the USA and Eu­rope.17 In the absence of the original, Rushdie offers his own close-­study of Naipaul’s Indian travelogues: “India, his mi­grant ancestors’ lost paradise, cannot stop disappointing him. By the third volume of the series [of the travelogues], however, he seems more cheerful about the country’s condition” (xvii).18 Strikingly, Naipaul’s ancestral history is not given its proper terminology, that is, colonial indenture, but playfully couched in Miltonic terms that not only occlude the specific historical and po­liti­cal contexts in which Naipaul’s ancestors “lost” their India, but as

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well frames that loss as a permanent inheritance for descendants of indenture. In this case, Rushdie, like other critics of post-­colonial literary studies, confuses what Vijay Mishra identifies as “old” and “new” Indian diasporas and commits the post-­indenture worldview of Naipaul’s writings to servicing the broader concerns of South Asian po­liti­cal, historical, and cultural interests; Naipaul’s works are, in other words, “indentured” to one view of Indian diasporic expression that hides internal tensions and contradictions. Mishra argues that the idea of the Indian diaspora is a strategic construct that has obscured impor­tant distinctions between dif­fer­ent migratory histories. Rather than view the “Indian diaspora” as one unifying category, Vijay Mishra suggests, We may want to read it as two relatively autonomous archives designated by the terms “old” and “new.” The old (that is, early modern, classic cap­i­tal­ist or, more specifically, nineteenth-­century indenture) and the new (that is, late modern or late cap­i­tal­ist) traverse two quite dif­fer­ent kinds of topography. The subjects of the old . . . ​occupy spaces in which they interact by and large with other colonized p ­ eoples with whom they have a complex relationship of power and privilege as in Fiji, South Africa, Malaysia, Mauritius, Trinidad, Guyana, and Surinam.19

Derek Walcott’s moniker for the writer, “V. S. Nightfall,” and his poem “Mongoose,”20 belong to a normalized tradition in which regional writers disparage Naipaul’s writings. As Caryl Phillips remarked, “Naipaul’s Ca­r ib­bean [. . .] is often intellectually moribund and backward-­looking—­not the sort of place that could have produced, say, himself.”21 Similarly, in her preface to the acclaimed anthology on Ca­rib­bean feminist writing, Out of the Kumbla (1990), Carol Boyce Davies shares that reading Naipaul’s treatment of a Black maid, “Miss Blackie,” and the “self-­deprecatory” tone of Mr. Biswas in A House for Mr. Biswas (1961) initially led to her repulsion of Ca­rib­bean lit­er­a­ture as a w ­ hole. Despite receiving unparalleled guidance in college u ­ nder Ca­r ib­bean pioneers such as Leon Damas and C.L.R. James, Boyce Davies admits, “Naipaul alienated me [and] [t]he self-­deprecatory tone of Mr. Biswas colored much of my subsequent taste for Ca­rib­bean Lit­er­a­ture. So I never could feel the same excitement and involvement that I felt for African and African-­American Lit­er­a­ture without exorcising the meaning of Naipaul and some other troubling concerns.”22 In this anecdotal reference, the critic follows the academic trends of the period—­sensitivity to the inexcusable racist undertones in a short story of a Black Ca­rib­bean ­woman is not extended ­toward the prolonged psychological malaise and social alienation of another colonized Ca­rib­bean community (embodied ­here in an Indo-­Caribbean character). Rather, this figure (­whether this be the fictional Mr. Biswas or V. S. Naipaul) must be “exorcised” before a fuller immersion into the field of Ca­rib­ bean literary study can occur.

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Such annotations have been hugely influential to the idea of Indo-­Caribbean lit­er­a­ture, ­here isolated to one man, but which bear no resemblance to the testimony of other writers of the Indo-­Caribbean literary canon who see in Naipaul’s works the dawning of a more expansive horizon in which an Indo-­Caribbean perspective is fi­nally given nuance and centrality. Patricia Mohammed said, “the prob­lem of the Asian in the new world” and his or her treatment have been central to Naipaul’s fictions. Yet, this preoccupation has been “rejected by many who do not, would not, or perhaps cannot read between his often acerbic lines” and instead endeavor to “reduce his single Asian voice to biography = experience = individual specificity.” What this accepted tradition has done is “limit the potential of this voice in the ‘new world’ cultural order and . . . ​shut out t­ hose who echo, in dif­fer­ent ways, similar concerns.”23 Naipaul’s works, though often read si­mul­ta­neously inside, outside, and alongside the postcolonial literary traditions of South Asia, E ­ ngland, and even Africa, are seldom, as David Dabydeen notes, appreciated as postcolonial “New World” lit­er­a­ture exploring the “créolization of the East Indian” in Trinidad.24 Torabully similarly highlights Naipaul’s importance for the post-­indenture diaspora at large, remarking that in spite of his sometimes disparaging outlook, he is still “one of the very first writers of coolitude. [. . .] Exile and indentureship, ­whether he rejected the latter, have left a major impact on his poetics, and this cannot be ignored when assessing [his] work. [. . .] We cannot fully understand his style and attitude to identity, with its paradox and contradictions. [. . .] In fact, t­ hese very contradictions are relevant to coolitude.”25 Torabully asks us to remember that in spite of Naipaul’s often disturbing portraits and his troubled reputation, t­ hese may indeed be symptomatic of the difficult birthing of a (post)indenture poetics in lit­er­a­ture. Receptions to Indo-­Caribbean fiction more broadly have, to no small extent, been cast within this anti-­Naipaulean rubric, which also devalues other writers who attempt a radical dialogue with regional aesthetics to explore a post-­India indenture diasporic consciousness anchored to Ca­r ib­bean po­liti­cal realities rather than only dealing with concerns of the ancestral past. Harold Ladoo’s exceptional debut novel, No Pain Like This Body (discussed in chapter 3), for instance, is habitually read from a socio-­anthropological lens that mitigates the writer’s use of magical realism to disturb romanticized and/or exoticized receptions of Hindu peasant life in the early years before indenture’s termination in 1917.26 Similarly, Clem Maharaj’s provocative novella about a post-­indenture barrack community working in a mid-­twentieth-­century sugar plantation, The Dispossessed (1992), is ­today acclaimed as being the “second historical novel on indentureship”27 and the “only text in which the dougla [racially or culturally African and Indian] is given voice.”28 But, when I first read the novel in 2001, the only review of the novel I was able to find, in The Ca­rib­bean Review online, had read as follows: “[t]he hopeless ­f uture of the characters is as clearly depicted as are the characters themselves, most of whom Maharaj seems to have ­little or

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no re­spect for. He paints their strengths and their weaknesses—­seemingly more weakness than strengths.” The general outlook of the novel is invalidated on the basis that “it would be extremely disturbing [. . .] if we ­were forced to admit that the f­ uture is as bleak as it was for the inhabitants of that sugar estate.”29 The novel’s only merit as “Ca­rib­bean,” according to the review, is the title, for “as many of us would agree [. . .] as Ca­rib­bean ­peoples we have been dispossessed.” Maharaj’s novel clearly follows in the spirit of C.L.R. James’s own pathbreaking novel, Minty Alley (1936), on the mixed-­race communities of the “barrack yard,” and is similarly concerned with examining the possibilities of an interracial ­labor consciousness on a twentieth-­century sugar estate dominated mostly by ethnically mixed African Indians. What is highlighted in the review, however, is the author’s dismal portrayal of a condition too “disturbing,” even implausible, to read. In chapter 4, I suggest that Cereus Blooms at Night, Shani Mootoo’s debut novel of 1992, made such an international splash as the Ca­rib­be­an’s first openly feminist queer work that it became the subject of numerous readings—­ranging from the ecological, phenomenological, feminist, queer, lesbian, South Asian, and even Canadian—­with indenture itself relegated to the background. This tradition has thus far neglected Cereus’s specific and critical significance to gendering indenture literary studies. I resituate the novel within the framework of an indenture poetics to draw out the indenture motifs and tropes central to Mootoo’s exploration of gendered belonging and trauma. In my reading, I particularly foreground indenture’s centrality to the text and its subversion of kala pani’s heteronormative and chauvinist constructs of exile and the exiled, both of which disproportionately f­avor men’s choices for travel and transplantation while stigmatizing ­t hose of ­women and queer subjects. The fuller context of an Indo-­Caribbean literary imaginary has also suffered from being cast “through the prism of an Atlantic-­centric abolitionism in which the 1834 emancipation of slaves in Britain’s West Indies colonies has acquired legendary status.”30 Along ­t hese same lines, Shalini Puri31 argues that the twin servitudes of slavery and indentureship [. . .] are marginalized in Postcolonial Studies, Africana Studies, and Indian Diaspora studies alike, for much of the work done ­under the rubric “Africana Studies” has ignored the Indian presence in the Ca­rib­bean and its relation to the African diaspora; equally, the bulk of the work done ­under the rubric “Indian Diaspora” has tended to construct a purist and conservative Indian culture, affirming racist, bourgeois, and patriarchal Indian interest, and erasing solidarities between Afro-­and Indo-­diasporic population [. . .] absences structured in part by the continuing legacies of neo­co­lo­nial­ism and imperial discourse.32

A diaspora and diasporic consciousness forged through indenture’s own transnational migration histories are thus muted when absorbed within the trans-­ Atlantic urban narratives of emigration, acclimatization, and acculturation

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composed by the predominantly skilled-­labor, working-­, or middle-­class immigrant intellectual Indians in Eu­rope and North Amer­i­ca. The reception and repre­sen­ta­tion of novels that center on (post)indenture history, persons, and culture are perhaps most especially impacted by the hypervisibility of anglophone South Asian Indian lit­er­a­ture and South Asian diaspora studies and the aforementioned group’s experience of passage and diaspora.33 It would be too far-­fetched to suggest a deliberate undermining of indenture cultural history, though ­t here is a definite sense of underrepre­sen­ta­tion that has produced in literary studies a monolithic understanding of Indianness as diverse in only very specific ways, rather than as differing identities that have developed in parallel and unique ways. The construction of postcolonial, anticolonial Indianness in world anglophone lit­er­a­ture has largely been, and continues to be, determined through prodigious writings of the British Raj,34 the Partition and Hindu-­Muslim irreconcilability, and of largely cosmopolitan western migrations and immigrations. From early anglophone Indian writing to the con­temporary period, a very specific image of colonial and postcolonial India and Indianness has predominated the imaginary and consciousness of world lit­er­a­ture writers and readers alike. The earliest works in this occupation—­writing about Indianness in English—­and the identity of its members have been contingent on, and even complicit in, reflecting India’s historical relations with E ­ ngland, En­glish culture, British imperialism, and, much more recently, North Amer­i­ca. In the de­cades leading to its in­de­pen­dence in 1947, the construction of a unified India and of the Indian citizen was in the hands of a cross section of upper-­class, upper-­ caste Indians from cosmopolitan cities (such as Calcutta, Bombay, and Delhi) who w ­ ere, significantly, educated in some form or manner in Eu­rope (­England, Germany, Switzerland, or France) or in a Eu­ro­pean establishment (such as the missionary school) on Indian soil. The fictionalization of India at this time was a primarily elitist exercise informed by the vision of like-­minded Indians who had inherited Enlightenment ideals. Despite the wide-­ranging and prodigious outpouring of South Asian anglophone world lit­er­a­ture, the one commonality the fictions share is concern with cultural assimilation and contact with the “West.” Such fictions have in fact dominated other renditions of Indianness explored by (post)indenture Indian communities in the Ca­rib­bean, Indian Ocean Islands, and Africa, which ­were also formed as a direct result of India’s colonization and which are, as I argue in chapter 1, distinctively anticolonial in their own terms. The very recent publication of Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis trilogy, The Sea of Poppies (2008), A River of Smoke (2011), and Flood of Fire (2015), which includes colonial Indian indenture to Mauritius in a larger exposition on Britain’s imperialism in Asia, is a rare attempt to breach the silence around indenture history and diaspora in South Asian lit­er­a­ture and literary studies.35 The distinctive creolization of an Indo-­Caribbean literary imaginary goes under-­studied and underexamined even in Ca­rib­bean literary studies perhaps

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precisely ­because of the aforementioned homogenization of Indian identities in academic writings that ignore and absorb the alterity and distinctiveness of post-­ indenture Indianness. In chapter 1, I suggest that this long-­standing convention of erasure and elision produces another kind of legacy in the con­temporary academic context when the study of post-­indenture cultural evolution is refused its own diasporic horizons—­which ­today includes Mauritius, the Fiji Islands, Suriname, Trinidad, Guyana, and South Africa—­and continues to be positioned within a binary relationship that privileges mainland South Asian cultural contexts. Thus my analy­sis gestures more in the direction of new studies in post-­ indenture theorization that urge for renewed attention to “post-­indenture culture and cosmologies which connect seemingly disparate sites such as Fiji, Mauritius, South Africa, Sri Lanka, and the Ca­rib­bean [as] inextricably intertwined in cross-­ethnic solidarities and relationality.”36 Hosein and Outar’s far-­reaching vision outlines new densities, rather than prior binaries, that can emerge when “epistemological production and circulation in the spaces of the second or third diasporas of Indo-­Caribbeans” come to define the “historical and conceptual language to describe their unique specificities as products of indentureship.”37 It is only by centering the “multiple voices of indenture [and] leaving out the national and geographic point of origin (i.e., India),” as Mariam Pirbhai suggests, that we can come closer to the full range of “cultural and geographic frames of reference” that reveal (post)indenture constructs of belonging as “multiple as they are varied.”38 Chapter 1 studies two indenture-­era narratives from dif­fer­ ent locations precisely so as to outline the “multiple voices” of a transnational and transcultural poetics practiced by indenture mi­grants. A comparative analy­ sis of the works by Totaram Sanadhya (of Fiji) and LalBihari Sharma (formerly Demerara, now Guyana) shows very clearly an opening up of the category “Indian” and an indenture consciousness rerooted and rerouted within diasporic spaces far removed from the center (in India) during the indenture period. My line of inquiry moreover endeavors to extend Mehta’s conceptualization of kala pani as a “discourse of rupture that initiates transgressive boundary crossings through creative (self-) assertions in literary production.”39 As Mehta argues, recurring central motifs in “kala pani literary narratives” include “questions of identity and (non)-­belonging in diaspora and in relation to India; re­sis­ tance to cultural assimilation; gender ideologies [and] negotiations of race and ethnicity within dominant Afro-­centered paradigms.” 40 Where my own work makes a clear and impor­tant distinction is in exposing the problematic ways in which a “relation to India” has been reductively presumed of an Indo-­Caribbean literary imaginary, and in outlining the ways in which Indo-­Caribbean literary narratives not only “dislodge” and contest the “ideological fixity” that has “stressed the primacy of Eu­ro­pean and African experiences” in the Ca­rib­be­an,41 as Mehta argues, but as well undermine and decenter the “fixity” of a hegemonic Indianness (e.g., casteist and patriarchal) by appropriating tropes of creolization

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and indenture. My focus on the writers’ use of creolization aesthetics furthermore departs from Mehta’s suggestion that The historical invisibility of Indians has been further complicated by the impact of creolization and its immediate association with black cultural traditions. Creoleness has, to some extent, furthered the divide between blackness and Indianness by often excluding the Hindu experience as a strategy of moving away from Indianness and indigenized Indo-­Caribbean customs. This exclusion has, consciously or unconsciously, affirmed the superiority of Creole culture at the expense of the “primitiveness” of “coolie,” or indentured, culture.42

I am not of the view that creolization or Creoleness operates in such a neat Hegelian binary, and I argue that creolization’s poetics of cultural anarchy and innovation have been central to Indo-­Caribbean re­sis­tance against ancestral taboos surrounding kala pani migrations and indenture cultural identity. In the following chapters, I also suggest that relations to India and negotiations with what Mehta identifies as “dominant Afro-­centered paradigms” operate in a dialectical fashion, such that an Indo-­Caribbean imaginary is as much about re­sis­ tance against the hegemony of ancestral Indian culture heritage as it is about negotiating the pressures of “assimilation” with regional influences. Given the historical complexity of arrival, conquest, and colonization in the American “New World” context, the real challenge to including Indo-­Caribbean articulations of belongingness in the region is not simply to disclose their “antagonistic” relation with African (and other) groups, as Mehta suggests, but, I argue, much more so to avoid complicity with the ongoing discrediting and disenfranchisement of con­temporary “American Indians” and their anticolonial movements. Creolization’s critical importance to an Indo-­Caribbean literary imaginary is in its gesturing t­ oward a “marronage” from ancestral Indian cultural hegemony, even as this new Indianness ­w ill be imbricated in the region’s own complex relations with Ca­rib­bean Indigenous ­peoples. In outlining the specific importance of creolization to the evolution of an Indo-­Caribbean imaginary, my other aim is to uncover terrains quite dif­fer­ent from Shalini Puri’s vision of a “dougla poetics,” 43 which some laud as a new “site of cultural convergence . . . ​within a hybridized space of ‘racelessness’ ” especially between working-­class Indian and African ­women,44 with other responses skeptical of its romanticized and “deceptive” cele­bration that idealizes hybridity.45 My work is foremost concerned with formulating a reading practice attuned to a writer’s use of creolized symbologies in the unimagining of older colonialist and ancestral constructs of indenture passage, culture, and identity, and with highlighting the selective pro­cess by which this minor voice elucidates a distinct form of Indianness apart from dominant renderings of this term. In close reading the first publications of Ismith Khan (1925–2002), Harold Sonny Ladoo (1945–1973),

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and Shani Mootoo (b. 1957), the instances of symbolic fusion that I call attention to—­e.g., Ladoo’s fusion of the plantation with the rice field or Mootoo’s use of the Indian “ajie” (elder ­woman) figure and “rice Presbyterian” (rural convert)—­ aim to highlight the strategic ways in which the aesthetics of creolization allows the writers to imagine the Ca­rib­be­anness of Indianness, and Indianness in the Ca­rib­bean, in the new worlds of indenture.

Indenture The geography of Indian immigration throughout the British and French colonies bears the makings of a truly transnational and versatile workforce stretching from the coal mines and railways of the British empire in eastern Africa to the sugar plantations in South Africa, the Indian Ocean islands, and the Ca­rib­ bean archipelago (including the DOM—­départements d’outre mer—­islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe). The Indian Ocean island of Mauritius was the first to receive laborers, and the first indentured workers to arrive in the Ca­rib­bean ­were brought to Guyana (then called British Guiana) in May 1838.46 In Trinidad and Guyana, which subsequently received the largest numbers, indenture Indians w ­ ere brought over a­ fter indenture workers from Portugal lodged a formal petition against their employment in 1835, which was accepted.47 More than one and a quarter million indentured in other fields of work migrated to Natal, ­Kenya, Uganda, Mauritius, Fiji, Malaysia, Ré­u nion, and Seychelles. In East Africa (namely K ­ enya, Uganda, and Tanganyika), Indians took up the task of building the empire’s East African railway or coal mines while working on sugar, coffee, and rubber plantations elsewhere on the continent. Even in the distant periphery of North Amer­i­ca, Indian laborers ­were hired as lumberjacks in the forests of British Columbia. Recruits came from mostly the Bihar and Uttar Pradesh states in India, but also from the southern regions of Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh, and could be as far varied as to include Bengal, Orissa, Oudh, Bombay, and the Punjab, including India’s own minorities such as the Parsis, who came l­ ater.48 In eastern Africa (specifically ­Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda) and South Africa, Brahmin (priestly) and Vaishya (merchant) caste communities of the Indian diaspora that had lived on the continent for some centuries had always sought to maintain and retain ties to the mainland, thus making it easier for lower-­caste communities arriving in the nineteenth c­ entury to do so. Indenture Indians in South Africa’s sugar plantations in Natal and Transvaal provinces, for instance, met with some form of familiar culture—­even though this would have been in relation to a community of Indians who regarded themselves as socially superior to the indentured. Even indentured Indians arriving in eastern Africa formed an additional group in the preexisting Indian culture (albeit one defined by the merchant and trading classes) that had had a long life along the eastern coast of the African continent.

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The end of slavery on sugar plantations across the Atlantic and Indian oceans threatened to create a huge deficit in the sugar industry, compelling colonial planters and merchants to seek desperate mea­sures to escape bankruptcy.49 In the British West Indies, the race to end slavery was “spearheaded . . . ​by British metropolitan interests” with the main impetus being economic, not humanitarian. Slavery had “become unprofitable” ­because the goods of the slave plantations had first to travel to the Western metropoles to be purchased. British capitalism had, therefore, “been pressing for the freeing of the slave so that a purchasing black population could be created in the Ca­rib­be­an: slaves could not buy manufactured goods.”50 During the de­cades following abolition, the introduction of certain laws banned the use of slaves (though its practice continued in some parts), but the demand for goods had only increased at the colonial metropoles, and indenture laborers from India ­were enlisted in the production of sugar for the Western world and industrialized areas in India (inhabited by colonials).51 While e­ arlier the planters had sought e­ very effort to “demonstrate that slavery was r­ eally an acceptable system,” they now “recognize[d] that they must accept (or appear to accept) controls and conditions desired by humanitarian opinion in Britain.”52 But, abolition’s call for ­human rights revisions merely led plantation o ­ wners to devise a new concept of the “worker” as someone offering to sell their ­labor in exchange for remuneration. Maintaining capital gains in this changing climate led to a search for a ­labor source that was most “malleable and as cheap as pos­si­ble.”53 At the same time, planters began promoting the use of “immigrant” as opposed to local laborers as this allowed them to outwardly show adherence to newly established humanitarian ideals while changing close to nothing on the sugar plantations; the mechanics of plantation slavery continued to exist not only in the re-­employment of freed ex-­slaves but in the recruitment of indenture laborers who boarded the same ships, traveled through the same ports, and ­were accommodated on the same plantations utilized during slavery. In the main, traders and merchants introduced new language to continue the same practice of enslavement without necessarily overhauling the system itself. Thus, the indenture person, now coined as an immigrant laborer, furthered a system that “enabled the planters to set wages outside the ­labor market. The planters’ constant complaints about the absence of a l­abor market or the unwillingness and untrustworthiness of the local workers served to secure active support of the colonial state for indentured migration.”54 During the indenture system (1838–1917), the indenture recruit was thus conceived of as a “­free” agent who had willingly and legally agreed to provide a ser­ vice in exchange for a salary (typically around eight rupees a month) and other compensations, even if in actuality payment was typically withheld or heavi­ly regulated so as to ensure control over the laborers by keeping them perpetually in debt. The initial guarantee for the workers was that they would work u ­ nder

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five-­year contracts (renewable) and receive food, clothing, medical care, and housing, including safe passage to India ­after the end of their contracts. As was soon seen, “housing” referred to wooden shacks that formerly served as slave barracks; “food” consisted of a rationed amount of rice and lentils that ­were of the poorest quality and infested with vermin; and the “salary,” which they sometimes went without for almost a year, was often a fluctuating amount depending on how much a plantation officer chose to take out as fines for absenteeism from work and other acts of alleged insubordination. ­L egal paraphernalia explaining the terms of employment and remuneration in the form of wages w ­ ere introduced, though t­ hese would have been pieces of paper written in a colonial language very few of the indenture could read. Very often, colonial merchants even asked the arkatiyas (as the recruiters ­were called) to make sure that the documents could not be understood by the signees and that they should not know where they w ­ ere g­ oing. Many, therefore, would not have realized that they w ­ ere signing on for work outside India. Samaroo and Dabydeen cite an example showing the extent to which recruits ­were misled. “Throughout the period of indentureship,” they argue, “recruiters thought nothing of telling an Indian laborer that he would be g­ oing to Chini-­ dad (land of sugar in Hindi) or that Fiji was a place just beyond Calcutta.”55 Recruiters at main deportation stations, in Calcutta (in the north) and Madras and Karikal (in the south), w ­ ere made mandatory to ensure proper h ­ andling during enlistment and w ­ ere usually made up of both colonial and native officers. A colonial officer was required to be pre­sent to oversee l­ egal ­matters and to ensure that the subject was properly inducted, and the native officer a necessity to provide the illusion of humanizing recruitment. Had recruitment officers been only “White” (most ­were from ­England, France, and Holland), peasant Indians would have been too suspicious or fearful to approach. The native Indian person was also pre­sent to serve as translator, though even ­t hese officers would likely not have been able to communicate in the regional languages spoken in the remote villages in which most recruitment was conducted. The job of the native Indian translator was undoubtedly made even more difficult by the fact that the l­egal documents w ­ ere often directly dispatched from Eu­rope and still worded in the official En­g lish, French, Dutch, or Portuguese. Some of the principal f­ actors ­behind indenture’s immediate success in recruiting large numbers of Indian peasants ­were the crippling droughts in the Bengal Province (where many of the indentured came from), the unstable economic conditions during the height of British colonialism, and the failure of the 1857 Sepoy Mutiny against the British, which left a ­great number of skilled Indians jobless in the colonial system.56 Reports from the period kept by recruiters in the arrival ports demonstrate the obvious unsuitability, thus improper recruitment, of t­ hose disembarking for hard agricultural work. As noted in some examples, toddlers, el­derly persons,

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religious leaders, teachers, jugglers, dancing girls, weavers, shoe­makers, barbers, and palanquin-­bearers arrived on plantation ports having had no prior knowledge of or association with working on the land.57 Out of abolition efforts, however, indenture laborers did benefit from several institutionalized incentives, such as land allotment, government grants, and the promise of repatriation.58 The contractual guarantee of repatriation, especially, presented the idea that Indians w ­ ere temporary residents allowed to live more freely as transients, whereas Africans had historically been withheld from even engaging with the idea of return, forced instead to view slave passage as the inception of a permanent exile. As Walton Look Lai asserts, “[t]he safeguard of the ­free return passage as an indispensable ele­ment of the indenture contract was insisted upon by the government of India [. . .] Thus the notion of the Indian immigrant as transient, rather than as potential citizen, as sojourner rather than settler, arose out of the special circumstances surrounding the birth of the indenture system.”59 Indenture contracts ­were perceived as “contracts of transience” that sowed the “seeds of several subsequent colonial and postcolonial discourses about Indians, their “place” and “placelessness,” their relationship to India, their relationship to the . . . ​nation, and ­whether they ­were natives or usurpers.” 60 In real­ity, paid repatriation created such a financial drain on the colonial coffers that it was terminated as early as the mid-1850s.61 While close to one third of Indians returned, most remained b ­ ecause they w ­ ere unable to pay the hefty fees required to pay the return passage and/or socially reintegrate, with o ­ thers returning to the Ca­rib­bean ­because they ­were no longer welcome in the India they once saw as “home.” The illusion of greater freedom for the indenture-­as-­worker in colonialism’s new market terminology furthered the idea that Indian indentured laborers received better treatment than former slaves. Indeed, planters aggravated racial tensions between ex-­slaves and the newly bonded laborers by systematically placing one group against the other. Competition for what seemed like ­limited resources created immediate racial tension between Indians and Africans, producing a false consciousness of antagonism that was in large part engineered by the colonial powers. B ­ ecause of the British policy of divide and rule employed in colonial India, indenture Indians would have been already indoctrinated to view “darker” Afro-­Caribbeans as ­either a threat to their own cultural identity or even an obstacle to their economic advancement, which further aggravated relations between Indians and Africans. In Trinidad, tensions between f­ ree Africans and bonded Indian laborers brought over by the British influenced the island’s social landscape to the extent that each racial community was forced into dif­fer­ent cultural and po­liti­cal relationships to the island—­cities and urban locations populated by Black Creoles, rural hinterlands by Indians. The origins of stereotyping “coolie” (Indian) and “Creole” (Black) identities as incommensurable opposites can be said to have been born within this aggressive capitalistic

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scheme that introduced indenture laborers into a sociopo­liti­cal climate that forced them into competition against post-­emancipation Africans, in spite of the fact that both slaves and indentures suffered against the same inhumane system that abused ethnic difference to promote and intensify ethnic tensions.62 Given that most Indians in the Ca­rib­bean, especially in Trinidad and Guyana, continued to live in the rural countryside a­ fter the end of indenture even well into the late twentieth c­ entury, the association of Indo-­Caribbean culture as insularly and uniformly Hindu inevitably invoked the pejorative meta­phorical weight of the word “coolie” and its meaning ­under colonial times. In the postcolonial context, this presented rural Indians as divorced from or insignificant to the pressures of modern nationhood. As Indo-­Guyanese historian Clem Seecharan noted, the word “coolie” “encapsulated notions of servitude, ignorance, heathenism and barbarism” that influenced greater Ca­rib­bean society’s perception of ­every effort at survival or success made by Indians.63 Whereas the culture of thrift was viewed by the rural post-­indenture communities as essential to transcending the stigma of “coolie” identity, this impulse was seen as yet more evidence of the Indians’ beneficial treatment through indenture and proof of their continued benefit from advantages denied ­under slavery. Thus, creole society, with its inflexible adherence to Eurocentric notions of civility and refinement tainted the way in which any pro­gress made by Indians was received. Indian inventiveness through agriculture and small business, opportunities that it must be noted w ­ ere new skills learned by a mostly poor and illiterate population, was viewed by o ­ thers as a manifestation of their lack of civilized breeding.64

At the same time, the internalization of middle-­class and cosmopolitan Creole ideals by urbanized Indians created an internal rupture between urban and rural Indians. The protracted denigration of rural Indianness, both internally among Indians and by the greater society, becomes especially problematic given that the rural Indian was very often the most prominent literary configuration of Indianness in Ca­rib­bean lit­er­a­ture, and the rural Indian w ­ oman in par­tic­u ­lar was one of the most visibly tokenized figures of cultural insularity and passivity in the Ca­rib­bean literary canon at large.65 Antagonisms between Africans and Indians ­under plantocracy have carried over into tensions between indenture and slavery studies, which are tied to a legacy engineered and intensified by the differential colonial policing of African and Indian lives ­under colonial rule. The importance of indenture’s distinction as an imperial l­abor force is critical in this context as it redirects contentious and ultimately unproductive debates that pit the study of slavery and indenture in a vertical hierarchy that highlights only the benefits the indenture system afforded its laborers while obscuring the larger ­human consequences suffered and endured by a­ ctual persons. Hugh Tinker’s pioneering works on indenture

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history in the Ca­rib­bean have been hugely influential in the continued perception of indenture as a “new system of slavery” which incorporat[ed] many of the repressive features of the old system, which induced in the Indians many of the responses of their African ­brothers in bondage. For ninety years a­ fter emancipation, sugar planters and sugar workers—to be followed by o ­ thers involved in other kind of plantation culture—­worked out the inheritance of slavery. Slavery produced both a system and an attitude of mind, in which the products determined every­t hing, not [just] the p ­ eople.66

In Tinker’s grim estimation, the psychic wounds of systemic enslavement ­were indelible, especially for Indians who comprised the greatest number of indentures who “arrived as coolies, and in many ­people’s eyes they are itinerant coolies still. For slavery is both a system and an attitude of mind. Both the system and the attitude are with us still.” 67 Indenture cultural historians argue that studies in the vein of Tinker accentuate the negative stereotyping of the indenture laborer as victim, inferior, and largely illiterate, particularly so in the identification of them as “coolies still” even a­ fter the end of indenture. Indo-­Fijian cultural historian Brij Lal argues that the “morally charged” debates that affirm an “indenture-­a s-­slavery paradigm” are misguided in that they deny the more impor­tant role of cultural “negotiation, re­sis­tance, and accommodation” for the indenture against the “coolie” stigma, where too “[l]ittle was known [and] much . . . ​ assumed about the social and cultural background of the immi68 grants.”  In the hull of the boat, Lal adds, they became “coolies all.” 69 Lal’s directive to view kala pani passage as a syncretizing and unifying journey, in which fundamental power hierarchies between dif­fer­ent classes and castes begin to erode, thus challenges ­earlier assumptions about agency and choice for the individual indentured laborer by highlighting his or her evolution as a collective—­ that is, not only as “coolies still,” as suggested by Tinker, but as “coolies” together. This shift is significant. For, though indenture mi­grants had formerly been studied as a homogeneous group comprising the lowest castes and classes from India, this came with no recognition given to the fact ­t hese groups would have had the most to benefit from transformation as diverse Indian identities, forging previously unimaginable inter-­ethnic, interracial, intercultural, and intracultural alliances as part of their changing associations with new communities in new environments far removed from the South Asian subcontinent.70 Marina Car­ter argues for a similar reassessment of studies that polarize slavery and indenture studies, stating that the “logic of a separate treatment of Eu­ro­pean and non-­European l­ abour mi­grants,” especially as utilized by pioneering historical studies such as Tinker’s, heavi­ly influenced the misrepre­sen­ta­tion of “indenture as a neo-­slave migration to argue that conditions of transfer and transplantation w ­ ere essentially coercive and acted, as with slaves, to alienate

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mi­grants from ­family, kin and nation permanently.”71 In her view, the indentured w ­ ere more so like the “first industrialized proletariat,” sharing more similarities to ­earlier Eu­ro­pean mi­g rants than slaves b ­ ecause of their ability to cultivate and participate in a “myth of return.” The indenture system was indeed “a rescue package for sugar plantations” which led to a “government-­regulated indentured migration to Mauritius, followed by the West Indies, the French colonies, Natal and Fiji.” Yet, this extensive migration “took place at a time when the much larger diaspora was ­under way of Eu­ro­pe­ans to Amer­i­ca and Australia.”72 Previous studies of the indenture diaspora, especially in its beginning form in the nineteenth ­century, Car­ter argues, “tended to stress ­either the opportunities or the cruelties of indenture,” which transpose prior established binaries (that is, from studies of slavery or of Eu­ro­pean ­labor migration). ­These binaries have kept from view “the point of enquiry at the subaltern level [about] ele­ments of detail of daily lives, aspirations and disappointments, as encountered and expressed by mi­grant families, which has for long been available to analysts of Eu­ro­pean migration.”73 The strategy of comparing indenture and slavery in this way, implied in po­liti­ cal theories aiming at “joining” the ­labor histories u ­ nder one rubric, is ultimately shortsighted. As Lokaisingh-­Meighoo argues, the legacy of pitting minority histories in the Ca­rib­bean, such as the Indian and Chinese, against the Africanist majority has led to a “reluctance to theorize the critical differences between, let alone within, Afro-­Caribbean and Indo-­Caribbean diasporic experiences” and a “failure” to understand relations between Indians and Africans.74 Besides obfuscating obvious historical, ­legal, and infrastructural differences, reading indenture as slavery’s addendum fails to contextualize “the doubly diasporic meaning of Indo-­Caribbean identity itself” given the fact that so many Indo-­ Caribbeans w ­ ere “forced to flee Guyana and Trinidad for North Amer­i­c a during mounting anti-­Indian riots in the 1970s.”75 Lokaisingh-­Meighoo further argues that the emergence and development of Indo-­Caribbean studies has helped secured a more inclusive framework with which to fi­nally “[a]ccept the concept of diaspora as style [and] culture [as] not a racial or even ancestral inheritance [but] continually fashioned and refashioned through the ongoing articulation of identity.”76 Indenture source materials, such as letters back home, court depositions, and petitions, not only demonstrate indenture’s clear distinctions from the culture of chattel slavery but also reveal details from the perspective of indenture mi­g rant laborers that go against the negative colonial stereotyping of the Indian laborer as usurper and antagonist or as culturally passive and bereft. As the works of Lomarsh Roopnarine and Gaiutra Bahadur also show, not all emigrants ­were deceived or duped into migrating,77 while Clem Seecharan has argued that narratives of abduction could possibly be strategic inventions by indenture populations as a way to assuage guilt for choosing

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not to return to India.78 In such interpretations, the indenture is read as one able and willing to navigate the thin line of subaltern agency and in­de­pen­dence—­ desiring as much to relinquish India as to return; though return through ­actual repatriation becomes impossible, in some cases even undesirable, its substitute is created by reinvesting the significance of searching for home in indenture’s new worlds.

Indenture New Worlds Historically in the region, dif­fer­ent constructs of Indianness in the colonial “new world” have superimposed over several centuries, such that a fifteenth-­century colonial misnomer, the so-­called Indigenous “Indian,” uncannily anticipates the arrival of ethnic Indians a­ fter the introduction of indenture in the nineteenth ­century. However ironically, this act of (re)naming is one instance in which the presence and absence of India (real and ­imagined) coincide. Stuart Hall has pointed to this as one unsettling con­temporary real­ity born out of Columbus’s desire: “when you visit Guyana or Trinidad, you see, symbolically inscribed in the ­faces of their ­peoples, the paradoxical ‘truth’ of Christopher Columbus’ ­mistake: you can find ‘Asia’ by sailing west, if you know where to look!” 79 Of course, this is a “truth” not so much paradoxical as it is a living reminder of the lingering symbolic afterlife of conquest in the Amer­i­cas and its relationship to the meaning of Indianness and constructs of Indian belonging. Indeed, as Torabully offers, the colonialist naming of the West Indies as les Indes (literally, many Indias) could perhaps be read for its unexpected accuracy given the fact that colonial India was im­mensely pluralistic. As such, in his reworking of “Coolitude” as an aesthetics of indenture Torabully has stressed . . . ​that India is not so much a monolithic nation as one would sometimes think it is, being in fact a mosaic of Indias [with] so many dif­fer­ent cultures and languages, religions and creeds, so many poetics or visions of the world, that one may describe the subcontinent as itself the epitome of diversity [. . .] In fact, it would be more appropriate to say that coolitude may help the descendants of Indians abroad, to realise that they engage India, or the Indias, in the pro­cess of the creation of a mosaic self in Guadeloupe, Martinique, Guyana, Fiji, South Africa, K ­ enya, Zanzibar, Mauritius, or wherever they may be.80

Indianness in the Ca­rib­bean (and the Amer­i­cas generally)—­whether in reference to persons or cultural practices—is a permanent sign of the region’s colonizing continuum. During early conquest, the imposition of the idea of India occurred si­mul­ta­neously with the systematic annihilation of extant populations in the Amer­i­cas81 and their naming as Indians, ideologically cementing the per-

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ception of a multiplicity of social groups as “New World Indians” and homogenizing an immea­sur­able plurality ­under a simplistic category that recast them as primitive ­people bestowed culture and civilization by Eu­rope. Even ­today, the term “Indian” remains an ambivalent and confounding signifier in its conflation with indigeneity throughout the postcolonial Amer­i­cas, such that the American Indian, Mexican Indian, or Peruvian Indian seem as if to belong to a single make-­believe ethnic tribe bound to the shackles of a colonial fallacy. The conflation of “American Indianness” with indigeneity in this New World context is complicated given that postcolonial discourse on indigeneity is “characterized [by] the politics of invisibility and unreadability.”82 Con­temporary historiographers, for instance, continue to pre­sent incomplete and inaccurate studies on the modern Ca­rib­bean and Amer­i­cas in the suggestion that Indigenous p ­ eoples are (near) extinct, with extinction being nothing more “than a trope used by historiographers (and their modern successors), [as] a standard and routine motif that has been assigned and attached to indigeneity not just in the Ca­r ib­bean, but across the Amer­i­cas.”83 According to Walter Mignolo, the constructs “Amer­i­ca,” “American,” “native,” and “Indigenous” remain entrenched in Western epistemologies dating back to the sixteenth ­century b ­ ecause of the absence of truly comparative studies on Indigenous populations (locally and globally) that are internally and externally varied and heterogenous though they continue to be perceived as homogeneous.84 Aisha Khan, in Islam in the Amer­i­cas, similarly makes the case that Muslims in the Amer­i­cas have seldom been viewed as “creative actors participating in the making of the socie­ties of which they are a part” and instead are perceived as an unchanging homogeneous ­whole perpetually trapped by the ste­reo­t ypes and categorizations of the “Western gaze.”85 As she argues, the “Old” and “New” worlds of Islam and Muslims ­were, and continue to be, in constant dialogue in the production of “alternative social and cultural spaces” in the Amer­i­c as. The binaries that have situated cultural discourses of the East and West through “negative contrasts” belie the “two centuries . . . ​ thousands of miles, and . . . ​dif­fer­ent perspectives” that have ­shaped the Amer­ i­cas and Islamic worlds coinstantaneously.86 When we add indenture Indians into this New World mix, what becomes clearer are the multiple and competing ideological paradigms that influence the politics of con­temporary (post)indenture Indian modes of being, making their “arrival,” as Hall suggests, part of a lingering colonial paradox in the region. From the very beginning of its use in the so-­called discovery of the Ca­rib­ bean, the term “India” has functioned as a cypher used in dif­fer­ent ways to facilitate imperial expansion. The imperialist framing of the Amer­i­cas as virginal emptiness ensured the absolute negation of Indigenous lives while superimposing a multitude of dif­fer­ent ­i magined Indias and Indiannesses. This legacy is explored in an early epic poem by Édouard Glissant, Les Indes (“The Indies”),87

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which connects the entry of the idea of “India” with empire’s willful refashioning of the Amer­i­cas as tabula ra­sa: And if the Indies are not where you are, I do not care! Indies you ­w ill be. West Indies: so that my dream ­w ill be fulfilled So that nothing ­w ill be lost of this astounding dream! The image is good and I w ­ ill keep it.

­ ere, Glissant traces how the symbolic importance of “India” and “Indianness” H served as ideological weapons that enabled Eu­rope’s complete usurpation of the New World as a divine right within the larger machine of Conquest. Illustrating the power of pronouncement upon Columbus’s arrival, Glissant posits the desire for India, both material and meta­phorical, as the first purchase that led to other forms of violation in the conversion of American regions (and its extant inhabitants) into the dreamscapes of Western imperial civilization. The symbolic valences of “India” or “Indianness” in the Amer­i­cas also preoccupy a long list of literary and philosophical traditions connecting a diverse range of Eu­ro­pean and Transcendental American writers. In Eu­ro­pean lit­er­a­ture produced during the centuries of colonial conquest, the “Indian,” w ­ hether evoking the trope of the noble savage, such as in Montaigne’s essay “Of Cannibals” (1580), or romanticizations of the civilized primitive such as in Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (1608) or François-­René de Chateaubriand’s novella Atala (1801),88 figuratively captured the psychological, philosophical, and scientific paradigm shifts introduced by the trafficking of ­humans and ideas ensuing from Eu­rope’s annexation of the New World. At the same time, the increasing stronghold of the universalist logic of Re­nais­sance philosophies and the overpowering theory of monogenesis helped consolidate the view that only one “race,” the Eu­ro­pean and male, ­rose above the primitivism of o ­ thers. The “American Indian,” precisely as the hybrid construct “noble savage,” helped to romanticize imperial expansion as an ultimate good for the conquered while also serving to allay Renaissance-­and Enlightenment-­ era apprehensions about cultural hybridization (of the Eu­ro­pean) in this climate of voracious expansion. In the works of American Transcendentalists such as Henry Thoreau and Walt Whitman, the evocation of ancient Indian philosophical and spiritual traditions offered no complications to the authors’ repre­sen­ta­tion of their contemporaneous po­liti­cal contexts which involved the aggressive persecution of the native population already being referred to as the “American Indian” or that, at the time of their writing, Indians w ­ ere undergoing the beginning of ­England’s colonization of the South Asian subcontinent. Walt Whitman’s famous “Passage to India”89 is in this sense an orientialist evocation in its unproblematic use of the trope of the Orient and its religious ethos to lament the spiritual erosion of Amer­i­ca’s own burgeoning imperialism.90 The specific use of the word “India”

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by nationalized American poets such as Ralph Emerson and Whitman, as Vijay Prashad shows, exposes the manner in which this early meaning of the word in the Amer­i­cas has continued to delimit Indigenous identity in North Amer­i­ca. In the North American context, the Indigenous as autochthonous (close to the soil) implied a relationship to an “unsullied nature with some ability to transfer knowledge about the spiritual realm even if in a primitive form,” while, at the same time, the language of “U.S. orientalism” in actuality used casteist codifications to clarify that only Brahmins w ­ ere deemed as “acceptable” Indians, whereas “­those who migrate (non-­Brahmins) are certainly unacceptable.”91 While the categorization of Indigenous groups as “Indian” in the con­temporary United States continues an imperialist coinage introduced three centuries prior, the Transcendentalists’s repre­sen­ta­tion of India as essentially spiritual has influenced the continued dehistoricization of even con­temporary notions of South Asian Indian culture through its primary associations with yoga, Ayurveda, and other forms of holistic traditions. Conversely, it must be said, the substantial mixing of Indiannesses during indenture and post-­passage has not mitigated the other real­ity that older forms of intracultural policing also carried over and that orthodox cultural Hinduism eventually became the predominant public expression of Indianness. As Roopnarine suggests, ideas from The Laws of Ma­nu, as ­t hese would have been interpreted by the poorer and illiterate groups practicing handed-­down edicts, continued to inflect Indian identity in the Ca­rib­be­an.92 Furthermore, despite the cultural diversity among the indentured, the use of a commonly known axiom to refer to indenture, i.e., kala pani, is another telling example of the hegemony Hinduism and Hindi have had in framing ideas about the indenture system and indenture persons. The predominating interpretation associated with the term kala pani, that is, the erasure of caste identity—­t he “blackness” (kala) of annihilation and alienation incurred through contact with the sea voyage (pani)—­privileges Hindu conceptualizations of passage while ignoring certain profits to non-­Hindus and lower-­caste Hindus. Kala pani taboos originate from a central stricture within the Indian Hindu caste system in which travel overseas is equated with social annihilation, reversible only by performing lengthy and very costly acts of repentance. In the section “Land of the Aryans” outlined in the Laws of Ma­nu, for instance, the worst person is the boatman or “seafarer,” grouped among the class of men who are adulterers, gamblers, murders, lepers, and madmen “begotten of ‘Unfit’ w ­ omen who are not Aryan.”93 Such notes in Ma­nu, of course, contradict ancient India’s power­f ul position in global trade during the Silk Route across Asia and eastern Africa, the Indian seafaring vessel known as the khotia in fact rivalling the Arabian dhow.94 Moreover, sea voyage was actually not prohibited in other ancient Hindu texts such as the Rigveda, which refer to the common practice of sea travel and contain only the prohibition of death by drowning. Most of ­t hese voyages ­were in fact conducted by non-­Hindus, Hindus of the lower castes already socially

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ostracized on the mainland (e.g. chamars), and a small number of upper-­caste Hindu merchants, traders, or professionals of the banya caste who had the means and support to conduct the series of religious rituals required to be reinitiated into the caste system. During British occupation, furthermore, prosperity and upward mobility was achieved only by securing qualifications abroad, particularly in the United Kingdom, which again reveal the rigidly casteist ways in which the same action, that is, travel overseas, can lead to the complete exclusion of some (the lower castes) while affording ­others (the higher castes) greater status in society via their newfound successes and achievements abroad. Given that indictment against sea voyage was strictly a northern, Aryan preoccupation, the southern regions from where many of the indentured came did not have the same stipulations against sea voyage. In southern India, fishing and occupations on the sea ­were a common and respectable trade (and remain so even ­today). The phrase kala pani was used colloquially even before the years of indenture and used by native Indians to refer to the jail compound built by the British off the mainland in what are ­today known as the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. Any native person deemed a threat against the Queen was captured and incarcerated in this far-­away island domain, inaccessibility ensuring the success of the island penitentiary instituted to imprison freedom fighters and in­de­pen­ dence activists.95 Thus, at one time, both the British penitentiary and colonial indenture ­were referred to as kala pani, the phrase itself serving to unite radical anticolonial activists and destitute indenture laborers u ­ nder British rule. As the atrocities of indenture spread, the fact that indenture Indians continued to use a phrase, kala pani, which signified social death or narak (“hell”), is a small but power­f ul instance in which the appropriation of a dominant narrative may be seen to signal a shift in consciousness. Specifically, whereas the scriptural meaning of kala pani effectively disallowed Indians to imagine their belonging anywhere but in “Bharat-­mata” (­mother India), the indenture did just that. Among the indenture, sea voyage may have been tantamount to permanent exile, an irretrievable loss of caste status, and ostracization from the larger social order; however, the fact that indenture continued for so many de­cades, despite growing knowledge of its atrocities, is in large mea­sure due to laborers re-­indenturing themselves96 and due to their own reconceptualization of kala pani as leading to alternative modes of existence. According to Lomarsh Roopnarine, indenture laborers strategized on their knowledge of indenture’s cartography, crisscrossing translocally and transnationally back and forth between India, across islands in the Indian Ocean, and the Ca­rib­bean archipelago.97 As Marina Car­ter suggested, while “it is true that for some the girmit years lasted a lifetime . . . ​its completion could signal a new beginning for an old immigrant. The journey across the kala pani certainly marked a break with the past; it also created a class of new providers, some of whom would become property ­owners overseas, and the

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found­ers of new settlements.”98 The latter was especially true of the Indian ­labor diasporas of Suriname, Fiji, and Mauritius. The major perils of kala pani, i.e., the loss of caste status and distinction, w ­ ere based on the assumption that dietary and other necessities could not be maintained during or a­ fter travel abroad that would require a person to open themselves to cultural contamination and impurity. In real­ity, the original taboos surrounding kala pani ­were substantially redetermined by indenture populations, in par­tic­u­lar marginalized Indians such as ­women and w ­ idows, lower-­ caste Hindus, Muslims, and Christians, who had the most to gain by eschewing the rigid sociocultural strictures mandated by a Brahmanical casteist social order. Last name and caste changes, common among the indentured, w ­ ere made to consolidate a change in social standing and would not have been the norm or even pos­si­ble in India itself. Such examples underscore the point that caste identity was not static and that kala pani prohibitions, if viewed from the perspective of the lower-­caste indenture person, functioned as guidelines that could be subverted. Particularly among the indentured, who had so much to gain (rather than to lose) from a loss of caste, kala pani crossing is thus also an instance in which new identities came into being by transgressing the “organising princi­ple” of caste precisely through the act of becoming “dif­fer­ent from the ­people back in India.”99 Again, what is underscored in this line of interpretation is that the ancestral valences of kala pani—as annihilation, pollution, and dispossession—­ are not maintained by the indenture but rather recharged to signify the opposite, that is, rebirth and reinvention through desiring to belong elsewhere outside the “­mother” land. Indenture thus could be seen to have had an unexpected role in forging bridges between diverse Indian communities, engendering intra-­Indian hybridities that came strictly out of the experience of l­abor. Languages, cuisines, rituals of prayers, forms of entertainment, and more, from dif­fer­ent geographies (e.g., northern Bhojpuri with eastern Bengali with southern Tamil) brought into contact on the kala pani passage continued, against all odds, a­ fter arrival. On the plantations and in the yard communities built u ­ nder indenture, it is pos­si­ble to imagine that ­t hese newly emerging identities continued an evolution pro­cess begun during passage. This is most clearly seen in the gradual evolution of Hindi and Bhojpuri in the Ca­rib­bean, especially in the case of Guyana where “creolization occurs in the mixing of Hindi, Urdu, Bhojpuri lexical ele­ments, in the Anglicization of Hindi, Urdu, or Bhojpuri expressions and in the hybridization of South Asian lexical and syntactical ele­ments with En­glish vocabulary, such as the pattern of emphatic word-­doubling found in ‘tru-­tru.’ ”100 The creolized En­glish phrase Girmitiyas (­people who signed agreements, girmit being a colloquial abbreviation of the En­g lish “agreement”), used mostly in reference to indenture migrations to the Indian Ocean islands, is solely the invention of

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indenture ­people and their passage.101 The indenture-­specific term jahajians (boat ­people or boat siblings)—­a lso split into jahaji-­bhais (­brothers of the boat) or jahaji-­behen (­sisters of the boat)—­evokes the trope of passage that locates the birthing of a new consciousness within the womb of the ship and through the ­trials of crossing, all of which are recognized associations within Afro-­Caribbean diasporic contexts. As such, Frank Birbalsingh stresses that it is impor­tant to identify a jahaji not simply as a laborer but a traveler who embodies “a new sense of h ­ uman togetherness invoked among Indian indentured immigrants by their shipboard experience.”102 The unpre­ce­dented nature of indenture passage to and arrival in the Ca­rib­ bean can be seen to offer several forms of positive opportunity for indenture Indians precisely b ­ ecause they ­were able to (and did) view the Indian subcontinent as an Old World. This group consisted of north and south Indians of diverse sects and castes whose “­middle passage” voyage was marked by instances of radical reinvention and re­sis­tance, even if such traits are not typically associated with the kala pani crossing.103 From this perspective, kala pani passage can be viewed as a turning point in which the meaning of Indianness begins cultivation beyond the borders of the mainland. In a (post)indenture poetics, furthermore, the significance of passage is redetermined by and among ­labor mi­grants for whom overseas migration, not only between the Ca­rib­bean and India but also between sugar colonies regionally and elsewhere, becomes a vehicle in the gradual constitution of what Look Lai identifies as the “action space” of indenture cultural transformation in the Ca­rib­bean. While all the pos­si­ble reasons for leaving India w ­ ill remain enigmatic, and while t­ here may always be some manner of a “symbiotic relationship between India and the Ca­rib­be­an,”104 through continuing cultural evolutions within indenture’s diaspora, w ­ hether in sugar colonies in the Ca­rib­bean or ­those in the Indian Ocean or South Africa, a con­temporary post-­indenture imaginary can be seen as one specifically attuned to the productive rewards of intra-­and intercultural transformation forged through passage and beyond.

Creolization and Indo-­Caribbean Literary Imaginary Creolization’s continued significance in characterizing the Ca­rib­bean region’s hybridity cannot detract from the paradoxes concomitant to definitions of this uniquely Ca­rib­bean aesthetics. While the politics of creolization are undoubtedly grounded in the urgency of intersectionality between groups previously stigmatized during colonialism, this has not automatically implied the easy ac­cep­tance of simply any kind of mixing. The very term “East Indian” has seldom been received within the rubric of creolization and has more so been activated to signify the difference of “East Indian/ness” in the West Indies as racial ­others.105 Thus, “East Indian” is used as a relational term to distinguish Indians

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from ­t hose who are “African-­born or European-­descended in the Region, [and] the title East Indian gets more spurious if we realise that it omits Chinese-­and Indonesian-­born mi­grants in the Region.”106 As Shalini Puri has argued, the aesthetics and discourse of creolization continues a “legacy of exclusion” signaled by its very wording: The term “creole,” even as it is used ­today in the Anglophone Ca­rib­bean, does not include ­people of East Indian or Chinese descent, groups that together constitute about 20 ­percent of its population; in Guyana and Trinidad p ­ eople of East Indian descent are the largest ethnic group. Using creolization as a figure for Ca­rib­bean hybridity thus has its own complex legacy of exclusion.107

According to Puri, creolization did not so much remedy ­actual histories or realities of discrimination and oppression as provide a way to envision the indigenization of (some, not all) nonnative mi­grant populations in the Ca­rib­bean. This “legacy of exclusion” is found even t­oday in the naming of parts of the Ca­rib­bean, most obviously in the continued appellation of some islands as the “West Indies,” and the fact that the term “West Indian” typically refers to its ethnic African inhabitants. Samuel Selvon points to the specific quagmire this offers for Indian Ca­rib­be­ans in his essay “Three into One ­Can’t Go—­East Indian, Trinidadian, Westindian.”108 Selvon’s essay points to the convoluted way the term has been used, even in the Chambers Dictionary ­today, where the definition for an East Indian means an inhabitant of the East Indies. This starts to be bewildering, and gets even more so, for when we have East Indians born in Trinidad, we should have to call them East Indian Trinidadians. And the ­people living in t­ hese islands are called Westindians. So by definition, what we have ­here [for the Indian] is ­really an East Indian Trinidadian Westindian.109

Apparently, even Africans in the West Indies and the “White man” in the colonial East Indies (territories in Southeast Asia including India) ­were once referred to as “Indian.” Selvon’s example of the confusing usage of “Indian” remains a clear example of how some versions of ­imagined community are constructed at the cost of occluding an impor­tant part of that unity. Originally, the word Créole (or Creole) was used in reference to a White Eu­ro­ pean who lived in the En­glish and French West Indies or the Amer­i­cas. It was also used to refer to African slaves in Amer­i­ca or to ­people of mixed Black and Eu­ro­pean (especially French and Spanish) races. In addition, it is also a term used to label any kind of patios spoken by the ­people thus racially and culturally mixed. As a settler-­privileging label also used to signify a form of transculturation, Creole identity in the colonial-­era Amer­i­c as was used to exalt the exile status of (White) Eu­ro­pe­a ns wishing to communicate their difference and in­de­pen­dence from the cultural hegemony of the erstwhile motherland. In their

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case, the category Creole signified belongingness in a new world away from Eu­rope and their Creoleness a sign of radical newness established by asserting symbolic kinship with Indigenous languages and cultures. The double bind made apparent in this reification of the term Creole is that cultural mixings and mixtures are ­imagined by emptying out prior realities so as to proj­ect an ideal of inclusivity that intentionally excluded one ethnocultural group or more. This is problematic especially in the case of the Amer­i­cas where the contours of native identity and belonging are, even ­today, based on how much and what kind of mixing occurs at distinctly dif­fer­ent periods in its colonial and postcolonial histories. The fact that Ca­rib­bean ideas about diversity and inclusivity are associated with a word, i.e., Creole, whose linguistic etymology once served as a signifier of indigeneity for (White) colonial settlers, does much to explain why theorizations of hybridity in the region cannot but partake in colonialism’s imperative to impose forms of social and cultural segregation. Michael Dash, for one, suggested that the meaning and significance of creolization differ so dramatically depending on linguistic region that any attempt to give it a single meaning would in fact mirror colonialism’s predilection for territorialization.110 The word creolization is a reworking of the roots of the word Creole from the settler context that includes new ways of being and knowing experienced by ­peoples “not ancestrally indigenous to” the Ca­rib­be­an.111 In the New World context, as mentioned, the word Creole once suggested the native status of (White) outsiders/ settlers while implying the foreignness of ­actual Indigenous populations. The term “creolization” extends on this meaning with the inclusion of criar, closely aligned with the African word Kikoongo meaning “outsider” as well as criollo, a word used by Africans to refer to t­ hose born in the New World.112 In Brathwaite’s pioneering vision for the term, creolization is seen as a hybrid term that combines crillo, derived from the Latin criare, which means “to raise or educate,” and the Spanish verb criar (to create, imagine, found, or s­ ettle), while retaining colon (a colonist, founder, or settler), so that the final word signifies a pro­cess of enlightenment and creativity both engendered by and developed out of one’s belongingness in the new, local environment.113 Taken together, ­t hese varied meanings join in providing a framework in which creolization is perceived of as a pro­cess by which outsiders imagine and assert themselves as insiders. As George Lamming succinctly put it, this is the “real meaning of the word ‘creole’—­t hat which is made, s­ haped, and formed by our par­tic­u­lar landscape.”114 Con­temporary usage of the word Creole, firstly, stresses the local context over the global and, secondly, is suggestive of a purely theoretical indigenization that excludes the presence of local Indigenous groups. Essential to constructs of creolization both as practice and pro­cess is this dual quality of Creole identity as a cultural difference that is relational rather than essential.115 In other words, creolization establishes Creole identity as “native” by privileging the belongingness

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of descendants of the New World and its diasporas, while at the same time maintaining its distinctiveness from autochthonous populations of both the past and pre­sent. For some, the conjunction of creolization with indigeneity is viewed as an appropriate reflection of a region that has endured a long colonial persecution compelling both Indigenous and slave groups to move in flight (oftentimes together) from one Ca­rib­bean island to another to escape colonial entrapment, ­these early passages viewed as laying the “seed” of all the journeys116 that continue to feed the cultural “cross-­fertilization”117 of inhabitants even ­today.118 Selwyn Cudjoe, furthermore, contests the claim that the Ca­rib­bean cannot be considered to have an “Indigenous” Africanist cultural tradition merely on the basis that transplanted West African socie­t ies are too diverse a group. Cudjoe argues that the islands ­were able to produce their own lit­er­a­ture precisely b ­ ecause of an absent monolithic written tradition. A pan-­Caribbean consciousness of “re­sis­tance and courage” was born and fashioned outside of the West’s hegemonic obsession with textuality and out of a necessity to return to orality.119 Yet, for o ­ thers, the fact that “subaltern settler groups” in the Ca­rib­bean ­today control a “new understanding of indigeneity that [supports] modern belonging and the institution of themselves as new natives” reveals the continued “displacement of Indigenous p ­ eoples” and exposes a critical fault line in postcolonial Ca­rib­bean discourse, where the symbolic and po­liti­cal valences of the term “Indigenous” has served as a ­will to truth that represents the beingness and belongingness of certain groups by rendering ­actual Indigenous themselves invisible, especially so in Guyana.120 Creolization in this sense is envisioned as an aesthetics that does more than simply reject prior concepts pertaining to identity, culture, or history, rather extrapolating from ­t hese to create a new rubric in which belongingness and reconstruction is imaginable precisely “out of fragmented, violent . . . ​pasts”121 even while carry­i ng with it negative connotations of taboo and impurity. As Roger Abrahams posits, what is now a “glamour term used to describe all cultural conjunctions” was once used to “describe the linguistic and social pro­cess by which dif­fer­ent ­peoples come together u ­ nder the harsh regime of export-­ oriented plantation agriculture.”122 Haring, in turn, argues that creolization cannot come to mean any kind of acculturation ­because of the local contexts through which a specific kind of interchange occurs: “the historical burdens of creole socie­ties, the socio-­economic or politico-­cultural conditions that are the matrix of creole artistic communications, or even the history of words like creole, hybrid, or contamination.”123 Elizabeth Deloughery further posits that island spaces constitute a very par­tic­u ­lar “[g]eography and history” that become specific to what, why, and how creolization occurs locally and regionally in the Ca­rib­bean, “the constraints of island size and perpetual arrival of new settlers by sea” making it ripe for cultural contact and contamination. In the Pacific islands, on the contrary, the rhe­toric of creolization is “threatening or irrelevant”

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precisely b ­ ecause of “the continuity of indigenous communities and language whose access to the land, fishing, language, and cultural rights . . . ​is expressed, legally and culturally, through a local rather than transcultural genealogy.”124 The new worlds of the Amer­i­cas, on the other hand, ­were first coined as a blank slate out of the “philosophical concept of tabula ra­sa,” and the subsequent denial of Indigenous presence and autonomy was further signified in the “colonial construction of terra nullius,” empty spaces awaiting Western castaways such as Prospero and Robinson Crusoe.125 Moreover, as Aisha Khan points out, while the term creolization has done much to posit a “par­tic­u­lar fiction” of the Ca­rib­ bean, serving as both “master symbol of the Ca­rib­bean and as paradigm for the global,” it does nevertheless produce “safe counterhegemonic revision[s] of the way we understand culture” and as such reproduces the “very assumptions and approaches” to culture it strives to undo and challenge.126 Thus, for instance, while Creole constructs have disproportionately positioned Indians as “outsiders” in Trinidad and Guyana, the category also “carrie[s] deleterious typifications of Afro-­Caribbean persons” so that “the restrictive meaning of Creole entrapped both Indo-­Trinidadians and Afro-­Trinidadians, if in dif­fer­ent ways.”127 Just as “Indians w ­ ere excluded ideologically from ‘the nation,’ ” Afro-­Trinidadians ­were excluded from “achievement.”128 Similarly, the Rastafarianism of Jamaica, which Stuart Hall considers one of the most impor­tant influences in anglophone Ca­rib­bean culture, pre­sents one of the strongest movements against the ideas of hybridization promoted in creolization. Rastafarianism “trac[es] every­t hing back to its ancestral African roots [and] is an example of a truly non-­creolized alternative, a ­v iable alternative cultural strategy. From within the imperative of the Rastafarian or an Afrocentric worldview, creolization is a disaster, ­because it weakens by an intolerable ‘mixing’ or hybridity the purity of faith and ‘tribe’, and the commitment to a redemptive return.”129 Despite the uniqueness of each definition of creolization—­e.g., as “unstable,”130 “selective,”131 or “asymmetrical”132—­all privilege it as a pro­cess consisting of stages in a longer transition, or collateral moments in a larger and longer pro­cess of dynamic exchanges and encounters where an end result is deferred and elusive. Nevertheless, con­temporary theorizations of creolization construct native identity as Creole, that is, as Black/African, at the expense of erasing Indigenous histories and ­peoples, Asians, and other minorities. This produces, as Patricia Mohammed writes in Imaging the Ca­rib­be­an: Culture and Visual Translation, a fundamental “prob­lem of being Asian” such that the Asian impact on the “continuing evolution of the Ca­rib­bean is [left] unmapped.”133 In this work, Mohammed analyzes representative passages and illustrations from nineteenth­and early twentieth-­century Eu­ro­pean travelers such as Charles Kingsley and Frederick Treves to demonstrate how such repre­sen­ta­t ions helped foster and reproduce ideas of racial otherness and difference rather than attend to ­t hose of

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diversity. Most typically, the physiognomy and bearing of Indians is presented as more “Caucasian” than Africans, and this continuous comparison of Asian groups to ­others, and references to the difference and inscription of an Asia as more culturally saturated compared with Africa has left a very untidy and cumbersome legacy to dispense with in postcolonial thinking and a terrible burden on writers like myself who constantly search for a more harmonious, open and optimistic script with which to read and reinscribe the past and the ­f uture.134

The fact that, etymologically, creolization referred principally to a cross-­ fertilizing linguistic pro­cess explains why the imperative to reinvent the colonizer’s language and cultural system was considered a direct path to decolonizing the minds of the once colonized. Inspired by writers such as Édouard Glissant and Edward K. Brathwaite, the francophone writers Bernabé, Chamoiseau, and Confiant, saw in créolité—­a composite of Asian, African, Polynesian, and Mascarene p ­ eople and traditions—an opportunity to reappropriate the ideology of the new world precisely so as to be fi­nally freed from the “terrible burden” Mohammed refers to. For Bernabé et al., a poetics of “creoleness” was inherently cross-­cultural and furthermore a positive pro­cess, “a braid of histories” that was an “aggregate of Ca­rib­bean, Eu­ro­pean, African, Asian, and Levantine cultural ele­ments, united on the same soil by the yoke of history.”135 Such a vision, for the young Martiniquans, would truly destabilize colonial constructs of Western universality and race to engender new relationalities through which postcolonial West Indians could became familiar with each other anew, once having been the unknown and unknowable ­Others of colonialism. Even at the time of its writing, however, the créolité of Bernabé et al. was criticized for its silence on impor­tant issues of gender in­equality136 and moreover blind to the specific cosmopolitan privileges afforded to Martinique as a department d’outre mer (overseas territory) of France and its prob­lems with neo­co­lo­nial forms of acculturation that continued to divide racial groups in the islands.137 Though créolité’s sweeping imagination of hybridity came to be viewed as a paradigm of inclusion ultimately rendered exclusionary, Torabully points out that the authors ­were perhaps alone in speaking out against the erasure of the Indo-­Caribbean in the West Indies, particularly so in works such as Aimé Césaire’s career-­defining work Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, in which references to Indians as “the Hindu man from Calcutta” alluded to the Indian person as a “foreigner” from India, “rather than as a part of the population of the Antilles.”138 Recalling his personal encounter with Césaire, with whom he shared his initial conceptualization of “coolitude,” Torabully is heartened by the ­great man’s words that “Coolitude is the poetic force I was waiting for.”139 Césaire had apparently explained to Torabully that, despite outward and apparent “hostility” t­owards

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Indians, the “Indian ele­ment” in the French West Indies was undoubtable: The curry dish called “Colombo” had become the national dish of both Martinique and Guadeloupe and “Marie-­Aimee,” a revered island saint, apparently a revised form of the “Tamil cult of Mariamen.”140 Beginning in the 1950s, the inherent ethnic diversity and cultural plurality of the anglophone Ca­rib­bean was established primarily through a writing tradition that flourished in the cosmopolitan diasporas of the postwar period, starting with the Windrush writers (so named a­ fter the vessel, Empire Windrush, on which the first group travelled to ­England). Despite the diverse range of lit­er­a­ ture written during this period, however, a Black, Afro-­centric vision was preeminent. In lit­er­a­ture, theory, and popu­lar culture of the period, mainstream constructs of “Creole” (as in native) identity alluded to Africanized discourses of anticolonialism that positioned Indianized (as in Indo-­Caribbean) forms at the periphery of or exterior to the period and region. Well into the 1980s, Frank Birbalsingh writes, “the very idea of Indo-­Caribbean identity appeared suspicious and the classification of Indo-­Caribbean lit­er­a­ture seemed superfluous if not subversive.”141 Writing from Western cosmopolitan centers by that time home to colonial mi­grants from all corners of the erstwhile empires, the organic quality of interraciality Lamming, Ramchand and ­others assigned to West Indian identities served to distinguish West Indians (and their writing) from other colonial subjects from elsewhere in the empire (i.e., Africa and South Asia). For Lamming, the history of imperial capitalism in the making of the West Indies produced a radical and unparalleled form of interracial fellowship that marked their unique cosmopolitanism. In line with C.L.R. James’s conclusions in Black Jacobins (1938), Lamming unequivocally frames plantocracy and the institutions of slavery and indenture within a modernist paradigm such that the Ca­rib­bean past, beyond having been utterly devastating and traumatic, finds its own mea­ sure of profit in the creation of the West Indian writer. Lamming’s composite West Indian thus follows in the tradition of Césaire’s rendering of a radical, global humanism in Cahier, in which the poet-­narrator, writing from Paris, eulogizes his return to Martinique by refashioning himself as a multitude: “I ­shall be,” he says, “a Jew man / a Kaffir man / a Hindu-­from-­Calcutta man / a man-­ from-­Harlem-­who-­hasn’t-­got-­the-­vote.”142 Nevertheless, and despite such examples of the Cahier’s universal humanism, it is foremost the text in which Césaire coins and defines Negritude, a movement described as being the ­will to “explode the whiteman’s racial myths that have distorted [African] humanity for over three hundred years” and to create a “system of values [. . .] necessary for all mankind.”143 Césaire’s special attention to Africanness in Cahier was in no way seen to contradict the work’s call to “all mankind” (from the Jew to the Hindu Bengali), especially given its pioneering role in exploring the hard l­abor of “return” for men, like the author, doubly dispossessed and alienated ­after their education and

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residence in Western metropolises. As Torabully suggests in Coolitude, “the negritude era ignored the Indian who was the coolie, socially non-­existent . . . ​ fundamentally on the margins,” one who was “[n]o longer the Hindu man from Calcutta / But coral flesh from the Indies.”144 The phrase “coolitude” was thus “designed to fill the gap, to describe and encapsulate the distinctive characteristics of the streams of indentured migration which have decisively ­shaped modern nations such as Mauritius, Trinidad, Guyana, Fiji and influenced ­others like Guadeloupe, Martinique, East and South Africa” (1). In the same way that the writings of Du Bois, Garvey, Senghor, and Césaire, among ­others, rescued the image and sign of Blackness, Black identity, and Black bodies, Torabully ­imagined coolitude as a new creolizing aesthetics and consciousness centered on “coolie” migrations beyond India (17). As he explains it, “[b]y likening coolitude to a coral, I, in turn, blend the image of the stone of negritude and the rhizome of creolization [. . .] growing with no predatory center in the pro­cess” (152). George Lamming’s groundbreaking The Pleasures of Exile (1960) developed a relationship between West Indian identity and West Indian writing that hinged on idealized projections of an interracial heterogeneity that mostly focused on Black (Afro-­Caribbean, African American, and African) diasporic writing. Writing just shy of a de­cade ­after Frantz Fanon publishes Black Skin, White Masks (in 1952), Lamming’s conclusions bear striking accord with Fanon’s own ruminations. Whereas Fanon rails against a “Blackness” pronounced and magnified by the colonized’s dependence on the colonizer’s language and epistemology, “white masks” that cannot or ­w ill not be cast off, Lamming explores ­whether such masks can be worn ­toward a new purpose. If West Indian history was seen to begin with Columbus as the “carrier of a virus”145 to its shores, followed by the institution and then abolishment of slavery, and thereafter with the arrival of Indians and Chinese through indenture, then the “third impor­tant event” in this history is the West Indians’ own “discovery of the novel [. . .] as a way of investigating and projecting the inner experiences of the West Indian community . . . ​not an exotic novelty [but] a historic novelty.”146 Having borne the burden of dispossession brought on by Western travelers, conquistadors, pirates, writers, and the aggravated assault of slavery then indenture, the West Indian person is a “novelty” not ­because of an exotic difference from Eu­rope, but by virtue of their inheritance of a remarkable interraciality, even if one enforced through colonialist interventions. For Lamming, the West Indian novel had the makings of a critically impor­tant “cultural commodity” precisely ­because it could be exported all over the world, and the West Indian writer new access to a widening horizon of both audience and literary content—­“[t]hat is how Eu­rope and Amer­i­ca would come to know them. That is how China and India would know them.”147 Despite Lamming’s own intent on establishing a difference between West Indians and other colonial writers, it is a distinction that focuses primarily on

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West Indian writers and writing and West African and “Negro” writers. Specifically, he argues, though “[r]acial integration” might be an ideal of the American curriculum ­after civil rights movements [. . .] it is a real possibility [that] has always been the background of the West Indian prospect.”148 James Baldwin, as Lamming’s primary example of the latter, is viewed as representing a perceptive brilliance even though his art is seen to “suffer(s) a kind of arthritis” by its inability to transcend the guilt, impotence, and embarrassment produced by enlightenment-­driven associations of Africa and Black ­people with the “jungle and tribe” (34). Dif­fer­ent from the “American Negro,” the West Indian is also dif­fer­ent from African writers whose sense of modernity has never had to negotiate the trauma of being “wholly severed from the cradle of a continuous culture and tradition” (34), or of having to see the world differently b ­ ecause of its advantageous location at the cusp of several cultural borders. Hybridity in Lamming’s model was thus viewed as a natu­ral consequence of the serial and systematic displacement and transplantation ­under colonialism, refashioned h ­ ere as “colossal advantages” for the West Indian: We in the West Indies can meet the twentieth ­century without fear; for we begin with colossal advantages [. . .] No Indian from India, no Eu­ro­pean, no African can adjust with greater ease and naturalness to new situations than the West Indian. (37)

Lamming’s urgency to define and differentiate the par­tic­u­lar coloniality of West Indian identity, a heterogeneous construct that is nevertheless homogenous and universalizing, is in many re­spects merited given that interracial unity was for writers-­in-­exile of the 1950s and ’60s a power­ful symbol of radical fraternity that subverted institutionalized forms of apartheid begun ­u nder colonialism and which continued to be felt in the metropoles. And, while it can be seen that the birth of the West Indian novel in E ­ ngland, and in En­glish, are tied to Lamming’s impor­tant conclusion that West Indian writing provides the genesis of new ways of seeing and reading En­glish, the symbolic terrain charted in West Indian lit­ er­a­ture from abroad did lead to the occlusion of realities back home in the Ca­rib­ bean at large, with modest space for Indo-­Caribbean writing and writers. Simon Gikandi, for one, notes that Lamming’s inclusion of Samuel Selvon is (at the time) remarkable, especially as Selvon’s version of an inclusive Ca­rib­bean identity takes an “alternative route from his [Lamming’s] own” in that it opens the landscape of Ca­rib­bean lit­er­a­ture to the folk traditions of rural Hindu Trinidad.149 This is in contrast to Naipaul, whom Lamming briefly mentions as a suggestion of the very antithesis of West Indian lit­er­a­ture, the “castrated satire” of an author ashamed of his native cultural background.150 The scant attention given to Indo-­Caribbean writers of this period in conjunction with an almost incantatory praise of Samuel Selvon further demonstrates the period’s literary myopia ­toward Indo-­Caribbean fiction, and has continued to ensure that

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Indo-­Caribbean lit­er­a­ture is analyzed in a binary rubric, ­either subsumed within dominant signifiers (i.e., ancestral and South Asian) or perceived of as developing in opposition to contemporaneous developments (in the Ca­rib­bean). Kenneth Ramchand’s hugely influential The West Indian Novel and Its Background (1970) makes similar claims to the unique racial and ethnic heterogeneity of West Indian fiction despite the fact that Ramchand focuses almost exclusively on African, neo-­African, and “Negro” writers and colonial influences on their lit­er­a­ture. West Indian writing is defined ­here as especially “distinguished from other works written in En­glish” ­because the authors “[draw] upon West Indian raw material,” the par­tic­u­lar fodder of authors who “include descendants of Eu­ro­pe­ans, descendants of African slaves, descendants of indentured labourers from India, and vari­ous mixtures of t­ hese.”151 This distinctive hybridity is made much of though the chapter on V. S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas (1961) stands as the lone representative of Indian “mixtures,” and without guidelines on how this work is to be studied alongside, rather than exterior to, the aforementioned influences. As Ramchand himself writes, Naipaul’s Mr. Biswas, in spite of all its playful originality and eccentricity, w ­ ill come to be seen as a de facto repre­sen­ta­tion of Indian life in Trinidad simply ­because nothing like it had ever existed in Ca­rib­bean lit­er­a­ture before. Ramchand suggests that Mr. Biswas ­will be read as representative of “Indian life in the West Indies” while also suggesting that, by the time of the novel’s publication in 1961, such a life no longer existed in Trinidad.152 Beyond the West Indian literary contexts explored above, the broader characterization of Ca­rib­bean culture and diaspora as hybrid and heterogeneous within predominantly Africanist and Black par­ameters has also led to the undermining of the distinctiveness of Indo-­Caribbean cultural evolution as diasporic and within its own (post)indenture diasporic contexts. Generally speaking, the privileging of Black, Africanist, and trans-­Atlantic constructs of diaspora in the New World context is not uncommon in academic studies of postcolonial cultural re­sis­tance. In the discipline-­defining works on postcolonial cultural production by Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy (both Jamaican), for instance, anti-­essentializing constructs of diasporic identity and cultural expressivity are developed by subsuming distinctive subaltern groups whose only ave­nue of agency came through embracing the po­liti­cal associations of identifying as “Black.”153 ­Until the advent of postcolonial and subaltern studies, it was commonplace in postwar E ­ ngland for po­liti­cally active minorities of ex-­colonies to embrace the po­liti­cal associations that came with Black identity. The titles and ideological thrust of Gilroy’s acclaimed ­There ­Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation (1987) and The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1994) offer provocative and compelling arguments against the erasure and misrepre­sen­ta­tion of subaltern cultural production and anticolonial re­sis­tance, whilst however staying focused on Black diasporic

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c­ ultural practices and subjects that hid from view the complexities of subaltern solidarity in post-­empire ­England. The 1980s and Margaret Thatcher’s ­England (Gilroy’s subject in ­Ain’t No Black) in par­tic­u­lar, saw an unpre­ce­dented rise in civil riots among and between poor, urban minorities comprising strong numbers of Indians, Bangladeshis, Pakistanis, and Indo-­Caribbeans. In a new preface to ­Ain’t No Black,154 Gilroy offers that his use of the category “Black” was meant as an inclusive one, whereas the breaking down of the signifier “Asian” into culturally and geopo­liti­cally specific “fractions” would have been an endorsement of corporate and institutional trends that would effectively lead to the “defeat” of an “assertive decolonisation [. . .] connected to wider cultural shifts like the rise of identity politics, corporate multi-­culture and an imploded, narcissistic obsession with the minutiae of ethnicity.”155 The “Black” label as “master-­signifier” had been, on the other hand, more “powerfully empty and possibly anachronistic,” and “Blackness” a “simpler efficacy—­a bridging term that had promoted vernacular cosmopolitan conversation and synchronised action among the victimized.”156 One finds this manner of idealistic racial “bridging” in Hall’s landmark essay “Cultural Identity in the Diaspora,” which other­w ise offers a complex and nuanced framework in which identity formation is presented as an ever-­evolving pro­cess conducted by and for once-­colonized subjects. Within this context, Hall’s identification of the Ca­rib­bean as a site of emerging and deferred iterations in becoming at first seems to exclude the possibility of a single cultural Ca­rib­bean identity, since identity is not an “essence but a positioning” that “does not proceed in a straight unbroken line, from some fixed origin.”157 And yet, for Hall, the “(Asian),” in parentheticals, are subsumed as the “ ‘Blacks’ of the diasporas of the West—­t he new postcolonial subjects” and the Ca­rib­bean diaspora configured as the “Black Triangle [of] Africa” in which the Ca­rib­bean, the United States, and United Kingdom are all “centred in Africa. Africa is the name of the missing term, the g­ reat aporia” (222, 224). Ca­rib­bean identities are furthermore divided by Hall into presences: the Présence Africaine, Présence Européenne, and the “third, most ambiguous, presence of all—­t he sliding term, Présence Americain” consisting of “the many other cultural ‘presences’ which constitute the complexity of Ca­rib­bean identity (Indian, Chinese, Lebanese, ­etc.)” (230). Hall’s categorization of Indianness (and other Ca­rib­bean minorities) as a Présence Americain—­and not a separate kind of Présence—is on the one hand an inclusive act that positions it within the Amer­i­cas, the “ ‘New World,’ Terra Incognita” (230). Yet, this gesture does its own bit to generate a hierarchization of the Présences into major and minor iterations. As Hall claims, it is the first signifier, the African Presence, that ­every Ca­rib­bean “must sooner or l­ ater come to terms with” (231). The first signifier, the Présence Africaine, ­w ill, according to Hall, become the “privileged signifier of new conceptions of Ca­rib­bean identity” and “[e]veryone in the Ca­rib­bean, of what­ever ethnic background, must sooner or

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­later come to terms with this African presence [. . .] all must look Présence Africaine in the face, speak its name” (231). Hall’s use of three “presences” to describe the cultural heterogeneity of the Ca­rib­bean and the inclusion of Indians, Chinese, and other minorities ­under the Présence Americain does come with the caveat that ­these are problematic categorizations which erase the very complexity of the “hybridity” that characterizes the “constantly producing and reproducing” newness of diasporic identities and the diaspora experience (235). While all ­t hese groups share a history of dispossession characteristic of the African diaspora, Hall argues, “the relation between ­these minorities is also a deeply troubled one (the designation ‘African’ being itself one of the principal sources of antagonism).”158 It is in­ter­est­ing to juxtapose such conclusions alongside Hall’s personal anecdote made several years ­later in a 2007 interview published in the Guardian to mark the opening of the Stuart Hall Library at Rivington Place in London.159 Hall shares that growing up in Jamaica was instrumental to his understanding of acquiring a “double perspective” essential not only “to be true [to one’s] own culture” but so as to “translate between . . . ​t wo cultures. It is not easy but necessary.” Alluding to Hall’s own mixed ancestry, the interviewer turns to his childhood: ­ eople think that all Jamaicans are black, he [Hall] suggests, and ­don’t underP stand the gradations that can exist within a single f­ amily like his. “My m ­ other’s connections to ­England ­were more recent. My ­father’s side was not pure African ­either, it had Indian in it, and prob­ably some En­glish somewhere. I was always the blackest member of my f­ amily and I knew it from the moment I  was born. My s­ ister said: ‘Where did you get this coolie baby from?’ Not black baby, you w ­ ill note, but low-­class Indian.” [. . .] He believes cultural studies was born for him when he was first told he could not bring black school friends home, even though, to white eyes, he was black himself.160

In this poignant recollection, it is pos­si­ble to see the contingency of racialized perspectives that reveal the pressure, if not only empowerment, of the Présence Africaine: the public world in which gradations of this Présence are still submitted to the rules of a colonialist social hierarchy in which any shade of this “first signifier” continues to be stigmatized, and a private world in which Indianness is hailed, however endearingly h ­ ere, as the lowliest of ethnic constructs due to its utter otherness from the Présence Africaine. In Trinidad, Indo-­Trinidadians’s self-­identification as “Black” was not uncommon, particularly during the Black Power movement in the late 1960s and ’70s which provided a public platform for Indians to voice their concerns while also helping to temporarily detract from internal conflicts of religion, caste, and regionalism. The so-­called Black Power Revolution was seen to promise a way to look beyond conflicts within the Indian community, especially given that its r­ unning slogan “Indians and Africans unite now” promised to run a joint

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platform addressing the unfair conditions affecting both African and Indian Trinidadians deadlocked on issues such as rising unemployment and unequal social access. Mahin Gosine’s study (1986) of the 1970s Movement in Trinidad, however, argues that the island’s promising interracial social movement ultimately failed and effectively marked the rising authority of an Afro-­Caribbean consciousness across the West Indies. Despite the fact that it came into fruition in the years leading up to the West Indies Federation, and despite the founder Maakandal Daaga’s emphasis on unity, the movement was not able to successfully address issues specific to Indians that lingered from the indenture period, leading to the demise of an other­w ise well-­intentioned interracial social movement. Furnivall explains that, “[i]n the period following Black emancipation, East Indians ­were [still] in the pro­cess of fulfilling their indenture contracts [and] confined to sugar plantations between 1838 and 1917.” Their mobility continued to be severely restricted even the during the Black Power movement of the 1970s, with most Indian populations still living in rural isolation.161 This ensured that Indian participation occurred mostly among elite, prosperous members of the group whose views did not necessarily capture the needs and discontent of the majority of Indians. The movement eventually had only two Indians, a development that coincided with the rise of fascist Hinduism among some Indo-­ Caribbean groups who used the intermediate raciality of Indians—­darker than Eu­ro­pe­ans, lighter than Africans—as proof of their higher status in a false hierarchy that mirrored the biases of colonial racism. As Walton Look Lai argues, despite the erosion and destabilization of caste value and meaning among Indians on the plantations, “Indians nevertheless found a new application of the notion of caste superiority in their attitudes ­towards the Black population, whom they incorporated into their traditional worldview at the lowest caste levels.”162 The naming of Afro-­Indian cultural identities and pro­cesses as “dougla” demonstrates yet again the slippery positionality of Indians within creolization’s double-­edged conceptualizations. As Roseanne Kanhai notes, although dougla “refers specifically to the offspring of a mixed African-­Indian sexual ­union [. . .] often referred to as racial half-­breeds or ‘ethnic bastards’ in national discourses on citizenship by both Indians and blacks in Trinidad and Guyana,” this shared legacy of exclusion was instrumental in forging an “inclusive dougla feminist space” of “inter-­ethnic solidarity [and] renewing old ties of cooperation.”163 In other words, precisely as a “third space” (Bhabha) to which both Afro-­Caribbeans and Indo-­Caribbeans ­were relegated by their own ethno-­cultural groups, African-­Indian alliances emerged as an alternative model of agency and re­sis­ tance, particularly so for w ­ omen. Though used in such contexts to signal a third space of interracial re­sis­tance, inferred in Puri’s outstanding study of the “douglarization of culture,”164 presumptions of its radical alterity did not by extension mean the a­ ctual ac­cep­tance of African-­Indian bodies or of other forms of dougla-­centered, transracial cultural expression and re­sis­tance. The use of a

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non-­anglophone-­sounding word to name this interraciality, furthermore, renders it other and exotic, and frames this convergence as product and pro­cess of what Rhoda Reddock suggests dougla widely connotes in the Ca­rib­be­an: the “progeny of inter-­varna [intercaste] marriage, acquiring the connotation of ‘bastard,’ meaning illegitimate son of a prostitute.”165 Strikingly, the fact that a word signifying cultural bastardization is also used to signal Afro-­Indian cultural creolization predetermines its incompatibility and inferiority in relation to acceptable versions and visions of creolization. The use of an Indianized word in reference to African-­Indian ­unions (sexual and/or cultural) thus retains Indian cultural biases against “darker-­skinned” Indians,166 and the term’s very cachet in fact highlights the difficult and narrow confines within which non-­African-­ centric mixings are hailed, conceptualized, and, ultimately, marginalized and stigmatized. For this reason, Gabrielle Hosein writes, “Indo-­Caribbean feminist poetics and politics” must begin to incorporate “multiple embodiments of Indianness [to] fearlessly situate mixing and transgression within Indianness, to challenge fictions of ethnic purity.”167 Within this fraught legacy, in which only certain kinds of mixings and mixtures come to be acknowledged or valued over ­others, what was also normalized was the fairly pop­u­lar­ized view that indenture Indian communities generally resisted assimilation or integration, and that their attempts at creolization ­were a superficial per­for­mance done purely for social advancement and survival, never “real” forms and therefore never “native.” The presumed ambiguity surrounding the authenticity or legitimacy of Indo-­Caribbean forms of cultural creolization is perhaps most eloquently captured in Derek Walcott’s Nobel Prize lecture (1992), which begins with the poet’s critical self-­reflection on acts of cultural misinterpretation between native insiders of the Ca­rib­bean. Walcott strategically stages the deconstruction of his own indoctrination in front of an international audience and by choosing a topic (the Hindu Ramleela festival) not usually associated with Ca­rib­bean culture.168 As Walcott goes on to explain, his error in translating the participants’ shouts of joy as loss marked for him a clear line of continuity between the con­temporary Ca­rib­bean and the colonial one u ­ nder plantocracy. In Walcott’s view, the colonialist objective in undoing Ca­rib­bean realities by seeing and reading only an alleged “non-­presence” had left its legacy on Ca­rib­bean native insiders, even such as himself, for whom the continuing evolution of Indian identity was momentarily misunderstood.169 Walcott implicates his own susceptibility in misapprehending the “real presence” of Indians in the Ca­rib­be­an: I misread the event through a visual echo of History—­t he cane fields, indenture, the evocation of vanished armies, ­temples, and trumpeting elephants—­ when all around me ­t here was quite the opposite: elation, delight in the boy’s screams, in the sweets-­stalls, in more and more costumed characters appearing; a delight and conviction not loss. The name Felicity made sense.170

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Walcott’s admission of his own misreading of the Hindu Ramleela festival as a “theatre” of “loss” (of India) is connected to the lecture’s emphasis on seeing (anew) laterally, an opportunity systematically withheld from colonized inhabitants and now critical to ending the continued delegitimization of Ca­rib­bean presences by its con­temporary residents. “Felicity,” or, acknowl­edgment that gives plea­sure or happiness, makes sense as the site of cultural reinvention, and also as that which is rewarded to the observer who can begin to undo preconceived cultural blind spots about other native insiders. As Walcott makes clear, sensitivity to this awareness is necessary, and powerfully regenerative, ­because differently fragmented colonized groups see each other, as if for the first time, and can continue proj­ects in decolonization that ­w ill produce new bodies of native knowledge. Recent studies, for instance, follow Walcott’s directive to appreciate the felicitation of un-­/relearning as ongoing, especially as a way to dismantle a long tradition of misrepresenting and misreading Indo-­Caribbean cultural expression and evolution. The latter is most apparent when attempts to define the “real presence” of Indo-­Caribbean culture occur mostly via analyses of Ramleela’s importance without, however, fuller contextualization of the myth’s importance as a changing historical, po­l iti­cal, and cultural document. ­These retellings of Valmiki’s original Ramayana,171 specifically, the sixteenth-­century version by the poet-­saint Tulsidas called the Ramacharitmanas, have been central to numerous so­cio­log­i­cal and anthropological conclusions about the Indian communities’ fossilized and static preservation of Indian cultural identity in the island diasporas of indenture, which in turn led to countless cultural anthropological studies claiming a fundamental irreconcilability between Africans and Indians in the diaspora.172 The idea that the memory of India was (and continues to be) kept alive by reliving narratives from an ancestral epic, sacred in main to the Hindu indentured groups, in fact facilitated the easy conclusion that Indian consciousness was indeed a single fragment (thus, in direct contrast to Walcott’s vision of the Ca­rib­bean as a “mosaic” of fragments) and that too one that had ossified through migration and over time despite the fact that both the Ramayana and Ramacharitmanas ­were (oral) retellings that had significantly evolved over centuries. Moreover, laying sole emphasis on Brahmanic and Sanskritic texts to define Indo-­Caribbean identity occluded the fact that Hinduism, and in par­tic­u­lar the highly popu­lar and public reenactments of the Rama myth, as the primary “theatre of faith” (Walcott), was also the main cultural platform upon which the homogenization of Indo-­Caribbean identity as uniformly Hindu occurred over time. Thus, the pop­u­lar­ized perception that the Ramayana could serve as the only “meta­phor of Hindu society”173 inevitably dismissed prior and extant intra-­and intercultural pluralities of Indianness in the Ca­rib­bean. As Sherry-­Ann Singh suggests, at dif­fer­ent moments in the po­liti­cal history of Trinidad and Guyana,

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even the motif of Ravan, the dark “demon” god of Sri Lanka, was usurped and interpreted by non-­Indians to offer dif­fer­ent conclusions about the Indian communities’ attitudes t­ oward the African community. This is in stark contrast to efforts made by some Indo-­Caribbean communities to recharacterize Ravan as the “quin­tes­sen­tial tragic hero,” as is the case in classical renderings of the my­t hol­ogy, and not merely as a raksha (demon), which made him a “­great intellectual [reaching] g­ reat po­liti­cal and authoritative heights” and thus a symbol of rebellion and hope.174 Moreover, teaching morals from the Hindu epic Ramayana, through theatrical per­for­mances called “leelas” or “lilas” (plays), was impor­tant not only for cultural preservation but, among rural Indians especially, critical to their re­sis­tance against Christian conversion and assertions of new belongingness. ­These plays are thus an example of Indo-­Caribbean invention and anticolonial re­sis­tance, and not simply as expressions of a static faith. Ostensibly, the stories ­behind the plays ­were close readings of events in the Ramayana, an epic that depicts the exile of Ram, Sita, and Lakshman; the t­ rials of their banishment (away from the center of power in Ayodhya); and Ram’s eventual reappointment as King. Importantly, however, its hugely appealing narrative of exile and return, coupled with its “propensity for non-­casteist interpretation[s]” of spirituality and ritual, was hugely attractive to both Hindus and Muslims attempting to re­create their lives in the new world.175 Tulsidas’s version, furthermore, was especially attuned to “acclaiming renovation without destroying tradition, for promoting change without sacrificing continuity.”176 Among Hindu Indo-­Caribbeans, special potency is given to Ram’s exile, rather than his return, which serves to emblematically parallel the deity’s fate with that of the indentured. Additionally, in some cases, greater attention is paid to Ravan who is an island god in his own right. Ravan’s dark skin color (traditionally connoting outcast or lowest-­caste status) and the fact that he is also an islander resonated differently for the many Tamil Indians from southern India who ­were darker than the northerners from colonial Bengal (modern states of West Bengal, Bihar, and Jharkhand). Ravan’s “darkness” in such tellings is reinterpreted in positive terms as a way to reinvest exile from the Indian mainland as opportunity and empowerment. Equally importantly, as Aliyah Khan notes, though Walcott’s Nobel lecture describes the “ongoing reconstitution of Hinduism and the relocation of mythic Asia to the Ca­rib­bean,” the “landscape of Walcott’s Ca­rib­bean difference is exemplified by the ‘Muslim minaret’ that is as much ‘at home’ in the Antilles and ‘of the Ca­rib­bean’ as other cultural influences.”177 The arrival of Muslim Indians to the Ca­rib­bean is but one moment in Islam’s long presence in the region dating back to the sixteenth ­century with roots in the African diasporic passages to the Amer­i­cas. In Trinidad, it was not ­u ntil Muslim Indians came in the mid-­ nineteenth ­century that the religion was revived publicly on the island, thus helping to “increase the visibility of Islam in Trindidad dramatically.”178 In the

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early years of indenture, despite the racialized tensions brewing from the arrival of a new ­labor force ­after the termination of slavery, Islam and Muslim cultural expression, in par­tic­u­lar Hosay (or Hosein), a Shi’ite Muslim festival celebrated during Muharram, became critical to fostering alliances between disparate Indian groups and between Indians and Africans. ­After it became illegal for Africans to publicly partake in Carnival, Hosay served as a multiracial cultural space that was a unique combination of two cultural activities that merged the vis­i­ble (Indian) with the invisible (African). Aside from the intracultural (Hindu, Muslim, and Christian) camaraderie of Indians during Carnival, its focus on Islam was attractive to Yoruba slaves forbidden from practicing it publicly. The highly sarcastic and performative nature of the Indian “carnival” borrows from the Afro-­Trinidadian social commentary calypsos and the African-­style mask Carnival, such as mas, which ­were parodies of stock colonial figures. One typical Indian parody was the enactment of the allotment of land to Indians that portrayed the colonial figure as a khaki-­outfitted character on wooden stilts. (This itself was a reenactment of the stock figure of the Moko Jumbie.)179 The Ca­r ib­bean Carnival was itself intrinsically a mixture “introduced by French planters, pop­u­lar­ized by poor Black Creoles, and by 1950s a part of urban Indian and Chinese life as well.”180 In Trinidad, moreover, Hosay’s presence symbolizes powerfully the extent to which Indian intracultural contamination and convergence enabled indenture cultural invention and evolution. The specific religious identification of Hosay did not deter Hindus (or Christians, and o ­ thers) from fully participating in a Muslim festival. Per force, then, the first Indian carnivals in the mid-­nineteenth ­century w ­ ere hybrid revisions of not only the extant African cultural activities but also of the Hinduism and Islam of colonial India. Carnivals continue to enjoy wide participation from both Muslim and non-­ Muslim populations.181 Beginning in the final de­cades of the nineteenth ­century, however, the Hindu community gained preeminence over other forms of Indian cultural identity through the efforts of po­liti­cal groups such as the Sanatan Dhar­ma Maha Sabha which, as Kris Rampersad suggests, not only served as a major cultural artery that kept religious ties between India and the Ca­rib­bean alive but gained steady popularity for its efforts to address the immediacy of needs felt by growing populations of Indians in the Ca­rib­bean during the first de­cades of indenture.182 The shift away from the inclusive and porous Hosay festival ­toward the exclusively Hindu Ramleela offered Indians a sense of unified community, particularly among t­ hose in the rural ­belts, which became necessary in their re­sis­tance against the state-­sanctioned initiatives that introduced Canadian Presbyterian missionaries to creolize rural Indians via Chris­tian­ity. As Neil Sookdeo notes, while Canada has seldom been viewed in the context of empire, its intervention in Indian villages in the nineteenth ­century through the Presbyterian church outline a clear imperialist agenda.183 The “Christianization of Indians in Trini-

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dad,” particularly during the turn of the twentieth c­ entury, and its connection with specifically gendered and intergenerational forms of trauma instituted by Christian colonization, which I discuss further in chapter 4, continues to be an under-­studied topic in indenture literary studies. Contradictory Indianness asserts that creolization’s ultimately open-­ended model makes room for new vocabularies to enter Ca­rib­bean literary discourse, which in turn allows for new ways of reading Indo-­Caribbean fiction as an evolving literary imaginary. Indeed, creolization’s privileging of contradiction, marronage, and the radically new is the ideal paradigm with which to broaden the study of Indo-­Caribbean lit­er­a­ture beyond a narrow canon and outside conventional frameworks that have, however inadvertently, enabled monolithic and unidimensional perceptions of Indian identity while obscuring its specific articulation within indenture’s own diasporic evolutions in the Ca­rib­bean and beyond. The importance of creolization to literary and cultural production (and their study) lies in the positive value given to modes of being previously demeaned and delegitimized ­under colonialism. The aesthetics of creolization furthermore reframes paradox and contradiction as artistic and philosophical goals with par­ tic­u­lar emphasis given to unknowability and unpredictability as productive markers of identityhood. Whereas the idea of contradiction ostensibly points to inconsistencies of some kind in traditional Western thought, it is also suggestive in the anticolonial of an alterity that invokes the auspiciousness of newfound, newly in­ven­ted modes of collective becoming. Most recently, for example, the concept jahaji bhain / bhein (brotherhood/sisterhood of the boat) has gained new ground as a unifying concept that explic­itly invokes the symbolism of other enforced diasporic transplantations. A jahajin (boat-­traveler) consciousness directly overturns the long-­standing view of indenture Indian cultural identity as unitary or stagnant, especially so ­after migration, and situates (post)indenture cultural evolution in a continuum extending from indenture passage on boats to the plantations of indenture ­labor. In Miriam Pirbhai’s conceptualization, a jahaji consciousness is distinguished as a type of subaltern intersectionality ­because it evokes the ­labor diaspora’s shared sense of bondage, cultural affinity and spiritual fraternity as it was initiated by the traumatic and perilous journey across the kala pani and solidified in the experience of dislocation, indentureship, and resettlement amid alien lands and p ­ eoples [. . .] The jahaji bhain princi­ple is anchored in a collective ethos [and] reconceptualized as the platform for a cross-­racial feminist alliance against gender, class, and other forms of oppression in con­temporary Ca­rib­bean socie­ties.184

Pirbhai moreover argues for the inclusion of female voyagers and laborers ­because a “female-­centered” view would begin to disturb the deeply rooted patriarchal undertones in the more generalized term jahaji. As a “figurative shift,”

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Pirbhai suggests, jahaji-­bhain would reveal how “Indo-­Caribbean ­women writers strategically begin their stories in a gender-­inclusive restructuring of the imaginative and discursive framework that has come to define the shared migration history and collective ethos of the Indo-­Caribbean diaspora.”185 Such a shift includes the move to read Indo-­Caribbean lit­er­a­ture as a creolizing imaginary so as to foreground its dialectical negotiation of belongingness within the Ca­rib­bean in synch with regional concerns and in distinction from an authoritarian ancestral Indian cultural worldview.

The Chapters The debut novels of Ismith Khan, Harold Sonny Ladoo, and Shani Mootoo instantiate what I call a “contradictory Indianness,” that is, the exposition of being and belonging as both Indian and Ca­rib­bean that resists both the colonialist and ancestral framing of indenture culture as exotic and fossilized and of kala pani passage as loss and annihilation. Unlike their more famous contemporaries in ­England, Khan, Ladoo, and Mootoo migrated to North Amer­ i­ca. Their fictions, as I suggest in each chapter, thus offer alternative visions of home and belonging that deal more directly with colonial indenture and post-­ indenture postcoloniality in the “New World” spaces of the Amer­i­cas and its diasporas. By rereading their debut and pioneering novels as rooted in the aesthetics of creolization, furthermore, I hope to support and further new academic work that ­will approach Indo-­Caribbean writing as a diverse and evolving tradition that is seen to engage with Ca­rib­bean literary and cultural tropes as much as it interrogates inherited forms of Indian cultural hegemony. As is implied throughout, an impor­tant aim of this book is to apply a dif­fer­ent reading strategy to Indo-­Caribbean anglophone lit­er­a­ture, especially by bringing to the surface under-­studied and neglected issues in analyses of first novels published in the de­cades between 1960 to 1996. In addition to applying close reading techniques that highlight the ways in which the authors make use of indenture motifs and cultural worldviews, I contextualize the themes and politics of each novel within Ca­rib­bean literary developments of the period to trace the dialectical weave by which Indo-­Caribbean writing and writers ally with the literary and po­liti­cal agendas of their regional counter­parts. The timeframe is critical as it places authorial choices about subject and theme pertaining to indenture’s historical and cultural legacies within key po­liti­cal periods in the region, specifically decolonization, in­de­pen­dence, and postcolonial migration. The choice to focus exclusively on twentieth-­century writers from Trinidad has been useful to highlight symbolic, thematic, and po­liti­cal synchronicities in works that center and foreground (post)indenture cultural and history in Trinidad.186 As my analyses aim to show, however, ­t hese works lend themselves to the exploration of a transnational and transcultural (post)indenture poetics that traverses

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dif­fer­ent locations of the (post)indenture diaspora. As such, I often use the term Indo-­Caribbean when suggesting parallels with writers from other locations in the Ca­rib­bean that share in the history of colonial indenture, and the term (post)indenture poetics to signify a broader aesthetic consciousness evolving out of indenture l­abor and passage, and within indenture’s diasporas. This manner of re­orienting connections within and across the (post)indenture diaspora is deliberate and strategic so as to break from an academic convention that continues to perceive of (post)indenture cultural expression and evolution in local and regional terms while neglecting its globalizing and diasporic cultural dynamisms. In chapter 1, though I do not study works from Trinidad, my comparative analy­sis of works written during indenture in the early twentieth ­century, and by indentured persons from then-­Demerara and Fiji, aims to trace the early emergence of a globalizing and diasporic (post)indenture consciousness developing outside the mainland. Each subsequent chapter focuses on how dominant Ca­rib­bean (rather than only South Asian) literary tropes of diaspora, the peasant, plantation, and exile, play a central part in the individual writer’s attempt to reimagine Indianness (as a historical, po­liti­cal, and cultural construct) within the framework of indenture and as Ca­rib­bean. Chapter 1 is a comparative study of early anti-­indenture narratives written during indenture and published in the years just preceding the end of the indenture system (in 1917). For Totaram Sandhya (indentured in Fiji) and LalBihari Sharma (indentured in then-­Demerara), the creative act of worlding their experiences and strug­gles on the plantations was indispensible from their efforts to reimagine and reinvent the meaning of Indianness outside and beyond India. In their writings, I argue, one finds the beginnings of a distinctively hybridizing diasporic indenture consciousness in which expressions of loss and grief elucidate the specific cultural dialecticism of indenture being and belonging. Pundit Totaram Sanadhya’s187 Fiji Mein Mere Ekkis Varsh (My Twenty-­One Years in the Fiji Islands) and Bhut Len Ki Katha: Totaram Sanadhya Ka Fiji (The Story of the Haunted Line: Totaram Sanadhya’s Fiji), published in 1914 and 1922 respectively, and Lal Bihari Sharma’s Damra Phag Bahar (Holi Songs of Demerara),188 published in 1916, offer us a win­dow into the transitional and transnational worldview of indenture communities formed during the same period in which indenture persons ­were framed as outcastes in the mainland and interlopers in their new worlds. Both authors problematize the centrality of the myth of physical return and, thus, underscore the search for new habitats as “home.” This indenture worldview is transitional, I suggest, by its characteristically anti-­caste tenor which serves as the most power­ful sign of a subaltern consciousness awakened to its germination and development outside and beyond India. The cultural worldview of the texts is also inherently transnational, requiring in both the e­ arlier centuries (in which they ­were composed and written) and in the con­ temporary period (in which they ­were translated and republished) the collective

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efforts of artists, activists, translators, editors, scholars, f­ amily members, teachers, and students of diverse Indian backgrounds and from several countries to render the full complexities of a burgeoning (post)indenture diasporic consciousness. Chapter 2 studies Ismith Khan’s The Jumbie Bird (1961) as an overt response to decolonization and the short-­lived West Indies Federation (1958–1962), which briefly promised a new, pluralistic pan-­Caribbeanness. While this period of decolonization included the marginalization (even persecution) of Indians, Khan’s characterization of repatriation (a contractual guarantee ­after indenture) as destructive to Indo-­Caribbean belonging was unpre­ce­dented at the time. More remarkably, Khan’s novel stands alone for being the only novel to situate the regional specificity of an Indian crisis in the 1960s West Indies—­“East” Indians imagining a return to an India that has never been home—­against the backdrop of in­de­pen­dent India’s own efforts to relinquish all responsibility for its overseas Indian populations, in par­t ic­u ­lar the post-­indentured of the Ca­r ib­bean considered a “prob­lem” by both the British colonial government and India. Whereas paid passage was revived by the Indian state to grant passage to some Indians in a decolonizing Africa suffering against the continent’s own pro-­Black campaigns, ­little support was offered to ­t hose in Guyana and Trinidad, territories with the highest populations of Indian laborers in the British Ca­rib­bean. In the mainland, “coolie” history continued to be associated with stigma. Specifically, my reading attends to the author’s impor­tant contribution in exploring a subaltern (Indian) interpretation of a topic, i.e., South Asian Partition, conventionally viewed only from the perspective of anglophone Indian writers from the mainland. Jumbie’s unique global south paradigm, as I show, contextualizes Ca­rib­bean decolonization alongside India’s own in­de­pen­dence from the British Raj to deliberately invoke repatriation as an anachronism (rather than a right) and to disassociate Indianness in the Ca­rib­bean from that of South Asia. What difficulties arise in Trinidad during this period become imbricated in Ismith Khan’s examination of multiple constructs of Indianness transnationally. By including the plight of indenture diasporans and framing India’s own decolonization as exclusionary, what is highlighted is that a negotiation of whose India is indeed pos­si­ble by the very group once considered India’s own illegitimates. The positive rewards of this fraught contradiction are signaled through Khan’s symbolic Afro-­Indian fusion of the Indian Muslim festival Hosay with the Afro-­ Caribbean “jumbie bird” (ominous bird from West African my­thol­ogy). The baptismal symbolism of Hosay overturns Jumbie’s conventional association with bad luck and/or death, thus framing Khan’s examination of a po­liti­cal crisis in positive terms, one that unexpectedly gives birth to a post-­India Indo-­Caribbean po­liti­cal consciousness emerging during Trinidad’s decolonization. In chapter 3, I examine the decentering of India’s symbolic hegemony in Harold Ladoo’s unflinching portrait of Indian rural destitution and of creolization from a rural indenture perspective. In No Pain Like This Body, Ladoo’s inclusion

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of the language, musicality, and spirituality of the rural Indian village redirects two impor­tant Ca­rib­bean literary tropes—­t he peasant and the plantation—to overturn the conventional view of rural Indians as “junglee” (wild and untamed), thus refusing the negative stereotyping of this group as primitive and culturally backward ­because of their isolation and destitution. The novel pointedly challenges unidimensional readings of kala pani passage as loss and failure for the rural peasant, whose destiny is no longer determined by return to the ancestral land and whose creolization through transplantation is unequivocally about being and belonging as rural citizens of the Ca­rib­bean. ­Here, the Ca­rib­bean, the primary site of exile once viewed as the temporary place of work u ­ nder colonial indenture, the kar­ma bhumi (land of work), is re­imagined as the land in which new destinies can be born in an alternate janma bhumi (land of birth). Unlike the eponymous divine king of the Hindu epic Ramayana, who returns from exile and banishment to reclaim his throne in the kingdom of Ayodhya, Ladoo’s young boy Rama “returns” as a spirit to reside within the rice fields introduced and cultivated in the Ca­rib­bean by indenture populations. The novel’s deliberate association of the rice field (an Asian transplant) with Ca­rib­bean themes of creativity and re­sis­tance play a significant role in shaping Ladoo’s treatment of the rice field as a literary and cultural trope of rural (post)indenture belonging. “(En)Gendering Indenture,” chapter 4, is an analy­sis of Shani Mootoo’s internationally acclaimed debut novel Cereus Blooms at Night (1992). The reception of Mootoo’s novel as the Ca­rib­be­an’s first overtly queer feminist novel has long detracted from the author’s repre­sen­ta­t ion of exile and escape as legacies of indenture passage that continue to shape post-­indenture destiny in the Ca­rib­ bean and beyond. Departing from literary convention, in which indenture history and indenture motifs are relegated to the background, I read Mootoo’s novel as a pioneering text that controverts the heteropatriarchal contours of ancestral Indian hegemony which, even in the con­temporary context, continue to associate flight and abandonment with betrayal and shame. Through the inclusion of varied and ongoing “crossings”—­whether physical, cultural, ideological, or sexual—­Mootoo recharacterizes exile as indispensable and productive, rather than taboo and annihilating, to evolving constructs of Indo-­Caribbean diasporic identity. This chapter covers new ground by attending to Mootoo’s centering of this alienation on Mala Ramchandin, an “ajie” (old w ­ oman) figure whose trauma is rooted in the forceful religious conversion of her ­father and ­mother. The novel’s focus on the inner psychological world of characters experiencing the historic and intergenerational trauma due to the Christianization of Indians in the Ca­rib­bean explores one of the most under-­studied topics in indenture literary studies. Mootoo’s repre­sen­ta­tion of this neglected chapter in indenture cultural history reveals the ways in which Chris­tian­ity became a “metonym for a much wider experience of cultural colonisation [. . .] which destroyed the w ­ holeness

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of the Hindu world and the psychic integrity of the individuals within it.”189 Mootoo’s gender-­inclusive rendering of this colonial trauma includes the hidden and oft-­neglected pressures placed on Indian men by a pro­cess that has typically been viewed as the “luck” of t­ hose accepted into Chris­tian­ity’s Western, Eurocentric world order. Mootoo pre­sents heteronormativity and socio-­cultural creolization as similarly oppressive o ­ rders that offer indenture and post-­indenture men and w ­ omen differential forms of access and agency in the nation, and which ultimately compel both to live as exiles from ­family and/or country. Broadening the very idea of an “indenture diaspora” is the objective of several new innovative studies in the growing field of Indo-­Caribbean studies, which has achieved greater visibility through the work of Indo-­Caribbean artists and academics whose works endeavor to redetermine indenture as both historical passage and poetics so as to resituate post-­indenture cultural expression within its own legacy of creative evolution. Though colonial indenture’s provision of repatriation continues to feed into a rubric in which the idea of return has remained central to configurations of (post)indenture belonging in both the new and old worlds of (post)indenture experience, the Conclusion dwells on the ways in which the idea and construct of “arrival,” rather than the mythical “return,” has influenced the forging of even newer imaginaries of belongingness in the Ca­rib­bean and its diasporas. In this chapter, I look at how recent Indo-­Caribbean artists, academics, and writers purposefully connect locations across the post-­ indenture diaspora in a transnational and transcultural fashion so as to reimagine indenture as both legacy and continuum.

chapter 1

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Indenture Passage and Poetics in Totaram Sanadhya and LalBihari Sharma Blessed are ­those who abandon their self-­interest and take part in the suffering of our overseas ­brothers. They turn away from their own families and come to the islands, giving peace to their b­ rothers. —­Totaram Sanadhya, My Twenty-­One Years in the Fiji Islands I left my home and came to Demerara, my name penned as “Coolie.” Forsaking bhajans, forsaking dhar­ma, the Ve­das I abandoned, to my disgrace. Of the routines of this Demerara life, I write t­ hese kavitt, t­ hese verses. —­LalBihari Sharma, I Even Regret Night: Holi Songs of Demerara

In Mythologies of Migration, Mariam Pirbhai suggests that a comparative study of “indenture narratives” is necessary as a form of “revisionist reading [that] strives to recuperate” the silences that surround “the untold histories” of indenture.1 Pirbhai stresses the importance of the need to expose the lacuna surrounding “the birthing of the kala pani narrative” (original emphasis), a rewriting of migration and belonging that recasts kala pani not only as history and historical passage but as poetics. Critically, the suggestion h ­ ere is to give greater heed to the birthing of expressive and affective cultural production so as to fi­nally dislodge the inherited and colonialist projection of the indenture person as polluted outcast, and of indenture as a system that offered laborers an easy transition from temporary laborer to settler or interloper in the colonies. As the following chapters w ­ ill show, one way in which a creolizing imaginary has come

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to define an Indo-­Caribbean aesthetics is in the repositioning of India itself as one other signifying point in the evolution of a poetics that subverts a central tenet in Hindu scripture—­t he kala pani as total annihilation. In this new interpretation, kala pani passage engenders a productive realm of creation and creativity that rescripts loss and exile as the loci of a burgeoning transnationalism centered within indenture’s own cultural continuum. While the following chapters w ­ ill demonstrate the critical importance of a creolizing imaginary to twentieth-­century Indo-­Caribbean lit­er­a­ture, this chapter purposefully studies works published almost within the same time frame and about dif­fer­ent regions of the early indenture diaspora. In juxtaposing early indenture writings rarely studied together, this chapter endeavors to demonstrate how ancestral proscriptions regarding cultural identity and migration ­were actively revised and overturned by the first group of indenture Indians. Placing t­ hese texts in a comparative analy­sis, moreover, is an attempt to bridge and connect distinctive kala pani narratives within indenture’s own diverse diasporic cultural landscape, where the center of reference has clearly shifted beyond the mainland. The transnational collaborations of con­temporary writers, artists, scholars, and activists that ­today have drawn ­t hese texts out from obscurity, so to speak, can be seen to belong to a long legacy of cultural innovation and resilience that can be traced to the writings of Totaram Sanadhya and LalBihari Sharma. As Sanadhya and Sharma’s texts show, more than aporia, pollution, and annihilation occur out of indenture passage; indeed, a comparative and revisionist reading of their writings helps to underscore the radical transnationalist, anticolonial, and anti-­caste sentiments in ­t hese early indenture cultural texts. Read in this way, Fiji Mein Mere Ekkis Varsh (My Twenty-­One Years in the Fiji Islands) and Bhut Len Ki Katha: Totaram Sanadhya Ka Fiji (The Story of the Haunted Line: Totaram Sanadhya’s Fiji), published in 1914 and 1922 respectively,2 and Holi Songs (or, Damra Phag Bahar 1916) by Lal Bihari Sharma, offer us a win­dow into appreciating the transitional and transnational worldview of an indenture poetics formed during the same period in which indenture persons w ­ ere framed as outcastes in the mainland and as interlopers in their new worlds.3 Both texts, written during indenture, reveal the efforts made by indenture communities to problematize the centrality of the myth of physical return ­after passage and, thus, to imagine the significance of their arrival in new places and their new habitat as home. The cultural worldview of the texts is inherently transnational, requiring in both ­earlier centuries and in the con­temporary period the collective efforts of artists, activists, translators, editors, scholars, ­family members, teachers, and students from several countries and of diverse ethnicities and Indian backgrounds to fully render the complexities of an indenture diasporic consciousness. This indenture worldview is furthermore transitional, I suggest, ­because it evokes an anticolonial and anti-­caste po­liti­cal consciousness germinating and

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developing outside of and beyond India by the very groups viewed as being of the lowest castes and as outcast(e). Rajiv Mohabir’s exquisite translation of Sharma’s songs,4 which I use in this analy­sis, includes explanatory contextual references covering the tradition of the sixteenth-­century “bhak­ti” (devotional) genre and its importance to Sharma’s poetics. As Mohabir explains in the translator’s note, bhak­ti poets “revolutionized the formulaic, ritualistic practice of Hindu religion as enacted by upper-­ caste (Brahmin)” priests, and their poetry offered a radical break from the caste hegemony propagated by traditional Hindu scripture. “­These bhak­ti poets, or devotional poets, opened up a new world of possibility” that excised the role of Brahmins so that “one could speak directly to god through song and prayer” (193). Uncovering ­these contexts was impor­tant to Mohabir’s own efforts to challenge the long-­held misconception that “­t hose who ended up indentured in the Ca­rib­bean w ­ ere uneducated [and] illiterate.” With this publication, ­there is now, he offers, “indisputable, published fact . . . ​t hat the situation is far more complicated” and that the indentured ­were keenly aware of and able to appropriate a highly venerated aesthetics of re­sis­tance (194). The Ramayana my­t hol­ogy, popu­lar among the indentured, was itself steeped in the bhak­ti tradition, and Valmiki’s interpretation in par­tic­u­lar was appealing to the transplanted l­abor groups precisely ­because of its “equilibrial and harmonious pre­sen­ta­tion of the potentially paradoxical relationship between the social world and the transcendant other.”5 Lal and Yadav state that the bhak­ti tradition was of special importance to Totaram Sanadhya, as well, and more generally to the indenture populations in Fiji who had “escap[ed] from the tyranny of the brahmanical socio-­religious order. This [bhak­ti] emotional, egalitarian and non-­intellectual tradition” was “integral” to Indians in Fiji ­because it “preached . . . ​t he fundamental oneness of humanity and the princi­ple of equality and brotherhood among all” (100).6 Totaram Sanadhya’s use of pronouns (excerpted above), however, reveals the ambiguous subject position of the indenture person who must speak as an other (rather than equal) when addressing the “homeland” during the indenture period. ­Here, Sanadhya is compelled to move between identifying himself as one girmit among other “overseas b ­ rothers” of the “coolie” system, then aligning himself as a compatriot among “­t hose” fellow Indians who make personal sacrifices due to their po­liti­cal activism (anticolonialists risking censure in order to take on the cause of the indentured), and, fi­nally, positioning himself as a repatriated ex-­indenture calling on mainland Indians to help bring about peace for their indentured “­brothers” abroad. Sanadhya’s main attempt in ­these lines, and in the work as a w ­ hole, is to signal the common humanity and brotherhood of Indians at home and of ­t hose on “the islands.” Having no prior historical or po­liti­cal background of the indenture period, a reader of Sanadhya’s quoted lines

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could come to the following conclusions—­that an ex-­indenture such as Sanadhya, upon making the journey back to India, has been successfully reinitiated into the community, that the involvement of the motherland to bring about the freedom of the indentured was not one of self-­interest but made to alleviate the suffering of Indian laborers trapped overseas, and that the dispersal of Indians across five continents through indenture had produced a rich tapestry of “­brothers” united in one cause (i.e., to end the system of indenture). As it turns out, nothing was further from real­ity: Sanadhya returned to India expressly to spread awareness about the suffering of the indentured, but his efforts to or­ga­ nize meetings and rallies on this topic w ­ ere continually thwarted, and his power­ 7 ful testimonio, which when published enjoyed some amount of fame due to its role in India’s po­liti­cal campaign to end indenture, was completely forgotten a mere ten years ­after its publication.8 Sanadhya’s sentiments thus demonstrate the poignancy of having to speak in code as a subaltern, in which an array of possessive collective pronouns such as “their,” “our,” “own” used to signify the fraternity of all Indians ultimately articulates his own growing strangeness—no longer simply Indian, not native Fijian, and yet undeniably belonging to both worlds—­a nd the exclusionary nature of being a diasporic Indian who is also a product of kala pani. Sanadhya’s writings and his activism indeed reveal that the castelessness stamped on t­ hose who went overseas specifically as indentured laborers becomes, as he claims in Twenty-­One Years, a signifying “blackness [that] would never go away” (98)—­ “This is the coolie from India—­you punch him with a fist, hit him, kick him, you ­don’t give him wages, send him to prison, and no one hears about it at all!” (67). “Readers!” he pleads in the last paragraphs of his testimonio, “Have you thought of a plan for t­ hese foreign-­dwelling ­brothers? . . . ​­w ill you encourage them, and embrace them?” (73). Similarly in Holi Songs, Sharma’s words have us oscillating between empathy for the laborers’ strug­gles and admiration for their spiritual forbearance. The poet begins his songbook by first identifying the pro­ cess by which he is transported to the foreign region of Demerara where he is “name[d] a coolie” and forced to live a life of drudgery, “disgrace,” and godlessness (29). This is the version of indenture anyone in India and the plantation colonies would have been familiar with, but the songbook itself offers much more. As the quoted lines elucidate, the same experience that has “penned” his new existence as a “coolie” produced, however unexpectedly and miraculously, a poetics and consciousness by which a laborer is able to rewrite the experience of indenture through “kavitt,” or verses. The poems themselves gesture ­toward the translation of indenture pain and loss into devotional songs that subsequently offer the devotee a medium by which to transcend the physical limitations of geography and materiality through collective prayer, singing, and remembering that transplant and transpose the old world onto new homes.

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Wording, Souling, Humanizing Indenture Subalterns speak and, more than just possibly, they do so all the time, though it is true that in most cases their desires exist in excess of the medium by which they are forced to communicate in order to be heard. The paucity of data and evidence supporting the views of early indentured groups themselves perpetuated both the colonialist view of Indian laborers as transients and the ancestral view of their overseas travel as social death, thus denying the aspirations and motivations of the laborers themselves. In the case of Mauritius (the first location to receive indenture Indians), Marina Car­ter has suggested that so ­little by way of documents “exist that express the world view of the Indian outside the intervention of a Eu­ro­pean author,” that the “voice of the indentured labourer reaches us only at certain flashpoints of history: emerging from a moment of crisis, a scandal or an enquiry.”9 As suggested by Frank Birbalsingh and Mariam Pirbhai, writings about Indians in the Ca­rib­bean, even if not written by them, can appropriately be classified as “indenture” narratives precisely b ­ ecause t­ hese “official documents, travel accounts, biographical sketches, ethnographic commentaries and some fictional or semi-­fictional narratives by Eu­ro­pe­ans” ­were critical to worlding a subject and a p ­ eople about whom very few in the colonies had ­actual knowledge.10 This is an expedient definition since the first published texts to give voice and presence to indenture persons and the system’s abuses ­were not written by South Asian mi­grants and a delimited view of indenture literary and cultural expression and production was in fact the norm throughout the period of indenture, where repre­sen­ta­tions of the indenture system, indenture persons, and indenture culture w ­ ere produced mostly by Eu­ro­pe­ans. John Edward Jenkin’s three-­volume Lutchmee and Dilloo: A Study of West Indian Life (1877) is perhaps the first fictional writing about indenture and is a remarkable, albeit exoticized and morally charged, intervention during a time when indenture persons and its practice w ­ ere largely neglected topics in lit­er­a­ ture. Jenkins, an Indian-­born British barrister, who ­later moved to then-­British Guiana, wrote the novel as an extension of his humanitarian work against indenture, which he first explored in a colonial report The Coolie: His Right and Wrongs (1871). As he claims in the preface to Lutchmee and Dilloo, despite his efforts in The Coolie to inform the “En­glish public” of indenture’s malpractices, “­little cared to read it.”11 Hoping for a wider audience, Jenkins employs standard fictional conventions of the Victorian era to arouse the sensibilities of his readers in E ­ ngland against the system of indenture. Written several de­cades l­ater, A.R.F. Webber’s ­Those That Be in Bondage: A Tale of Indian Indenture and Sunlit Western ­Waters (1917), also written and published in Guyana, is, like Jenkins’s work, largely sympathetic to indenture’s exploitative practices though in this work the protagonist is not an indentured person but a young man from the planter classes. A fairly

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prosperous member of the Creole m ­ iddle class, as well as a journalist and editor to the New Daily Chronicle from 1919 to 1925, Webber had the means to self-­publish a novel covering what was (still) at the time an unexplored subject in lit­er­a­ture. Noteworthy in both texts are the authors’ efforts to introduce an unfamiliar social group through the imaginative lenses of fiction. Jenkins, in par­tic­u­lar, traces the long trajectory of indenture and starts his story with the treachery of the recruiters in Indian villages before g­ oing on to depict the travails of passage and life on the sugar estates. Webber’s novel, while ostensibly about the system of colonial indenture, deals more philosophically on the theme of bondage as a universal h ­ uman condition. Both Jenkins and Webber, as well, denounce indenture without explic­itly critiquing its systemic gendered and racialized dynamics, while si­mul­ta­neously recycling highly romanticized misconceptions about Indians. Despite the fact that the abovementioned texts portray abuses within indenture practices (both in India and the Ca­rib­bean), the arc of the narratives remains fixed on the system’s immediate consequences on the livelihood of the ruling classes. While laying bare many of the flaws in the system and charting new literary terrain by elevating indenture into the realm of lit­er­a­ture, the novels’ interior worlds never fully incorporate the perspective of the Indian characters. Indenture, in other words, functions as a purely signifying construct in the ser­vice of exposing the malpractices of a system gone awry, without any incorporation of the wider socio-­political and psychological strug­gles experienced by this group. As such, David Dabydeen, in his introduction to a newly published edition of Jenkins’s Lutchmee and Dilloo, claims that the absence of the voice of the indenture means that the indenture character remains “enslaved” to the narrative.12 As Vijya Mishra points out, the creation of a Jewish homeland is “the exception and not the rule—­d iasporas do not return to their homeland (real or ­imagined)” (2).13 But, in the context of kala pani migration, he argues, “the absolute impossibility of return” has produced an overwhelming bias in which thematizations of “trauma and loss” have come to be seen as the defining vectors of the “felt lives of the p ­ eople of the old Indian plantation diaspora” (49) and this, by extension, has further silenced the voices of indenture. Not accidentally, Mishra argues, this framework is due to the fact that the old Indian diaspora (i.e., nineteenth-­century indenture) has long lived in the ideological shadow of “intellectuals” of the new (late modern) Indian diaspora who presume that the lives of the Indian NRIs . . . ​constitute the self-­evidently legitimate archive with which to explore histories of diasporic subjectivities. They have also tended to presume that the “new” pre­sents itself as the dominant (and indeed the more exciting) site for purposes of diasporic comment. The binary therefore has a strategic function: it recognizes an e­ arlier phase of migration, the psychic imaginary of which involved a reading of India based on a journey that was complete, a journey that was final. (2)

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In this Hegelian bind, where a master narrative situates “new” migrations as central and ­others as peripheral, it becomes impossible to grasp the complexities of other (especially older) journeys be they physical, psychic, or spiritual ­because of their habitual framing as illegitimate Indian diasporas. Indo-­Mauritian poet Khal Torabully for this reason envisions coolitude as a corrective and transoceanic poetics against viewing indenture as complete loss, advocating instead for the co-­option of the signs and signifiers once used to dehumanize and delegitimize indenture being(s) so as to relate the unique belongingness of post-­indenture communities. In “The Book of Voyage” from his remarkable anthology Coolitude, the poet identifies as “coolie,” as did Sanadhya and Sharma explic­itly before him, and offers the word as a sanctuary for all travelers who “cross(es) the ocean to be born.” “In saying coolie,” the poet willingly breaks ­free from internalizing the once-­taboo associations of the word ­toward a new reconceptualization, wondering how now to best “Word me/Soul me/Humanise me/Man me.”14 This chapter endeavors to engage with its own manner of re­orientation ­toward “trans-­oceanic thinking” (apropos Hosein and Outar) by turning to the astonishing transdisciplinary, translingual, transcontinental, collaborative, and diachronic pathways that have, to borrow from Torabully, worded, souled, and humanized indenture. My reading of Sanadhya and Sharma’s texts is especially inspired by turns in the narratives that evince a cultural density produced through the paradox of translating the suffering and trauma of indenture into positive terms. As I argue, in such moments, Sanadhya and Sharma do much more than simply speak to the lingering and continually debilitating signifying relationship between indenture and the ancestral, in which kala pani passage translates only as loss and corruption, as has been typically assumed. Rather, I treat such moments of density in both texts as the politicization of a diasporic Indianness in which rejoicing, desire, longing, and outrage together inform the newness of being and belonging in indenture terms. The complex and convoluted pro­cess leading up to the production, publication, and translation of both Sanadhya’s Fiji texts and LalBihari Sharma’s Holi Songs moreover reveals the fascinating ways in which cultural expressions from dif­fer­ent ends of an indenture continuum coalesce and communicate. Holi Songs was not even known to exist u ­ ntil accidentally discovered by Indo-­Guyanese journalist and writer Gaiutra Bahadur in a “footnote,” and the original text was thought to be lost u ­ ntil ­later uncovered through relentless investigation. It was first translated by Bahadur and her collaborators for her award-­winning work Coolie ­Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture (2013). The original text’s remarkable linguistic multiplicity—­written in the Devanagari script “in a combination of Awadhi and Bhojpuri . . . ​as well as in Braj Bhasha” (the poetic language of medieval Indian poet-­saints)—­required Bahadur to pull together collaborators from India, the U.S.A., and the Ca­rib­be­an.15 Though Bahadur had thought to find in Sharma the “promise of indentured subjectivity [and] the prospect of an indentured immigrant’s inner life, in his

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own words” (178) or even the “subaltern” view of testimonios, she learns from Sharma’s surviving grand­son that the “songbook may not have circulated as part of the campaign against indenture” (189) and that the songs w ­ ere most likely compiled as devotional songs meant to be sung during Phagwa (Hindu festival Holi) cele­brations at the onset of spring. She also discovers that LalBihari Sharma had actually been a “sirdar” or overseer on the plantations who had moved up the ranks from being an indenture laborer to owner of several rice farms, landlord, and moneylender. Sharma had also become the Indian community’s “religious leader” and was an orthodox Hindu. But, the journey ­behind Holi Songs’s publication has much to teach us about the transnational legacy of a (post)indenture cultural continuum: ­These holy songs from then-­Demerara, written by a mi­grant of the indenture diaspora and composed in the oral traditions of the Bhojpuri region, where many of t­ hose indentured in Guyana w ­ ere from, traveled to India for publication (in Bombay) and journeyed back “home” to the early-­twentieth-­century Ca­rib­bean. More than a hundred years ­later, this text finds yet another manner of home via its exchange between Bahadur and Indo-­Guyanese poet Rajiv Mohabir. Mohabir’s rendering of Sharma’s original songbook, titled I Even Regret Night: Holi Songs of Demerara, attends specifically to the unexpected role spirituality and devotion played in the indenture plantation context. His translation aims to foreground the spiritual design of songs of springtime (Phagwa or Holi) that are meant to be “performed by two lines of singers that face one another and sing back and forth . . . ​each with its own par­tic­u ­lar pattern of vigor and rest” which provide an other­w ise impoverished community a medium for spiritual rapture and transcendence (194). Each of Mohabir’s translations of a par­tic­u ­lar song sits on the adjacent page facing Sharma’s original in the Devanagri script, but the structure of Holi Songs also makes room for the songs’ rendition into the roman alphabet and their transliteration into Guyanese Creole. As such, this latest iteration of Sharma’s original Damra Phag Bahar invites the con­temporary reader to participate in a “back and forth” reading practice that mirrors the per­ for­mance of the singing devotees of old. Since Phagwa cele­brations are distinguished by the presence of formal or informal oral storytellers, both Sharma and Mohabir’s positionality as orator-­poets is significant. Throughout Damra Phag Bahar, Sharma speaks directly to his audience, identifies them as his listeners, and consistently offers advice and solace through his kavitt. Mohabir, in translating Sharma, re-­embodies this role as teller and becomes the next medium through which indenture is once again worded, souled, and humanized for a new generation of listeners. We flip between pages of Holi Songs that draw out the multiple versions of a single song in dif­fer­ent language forms; si­mul­ta­neously, we become participants in the reanimation of a legacy in which an indenture-­ ancestry poet of the twenty-­first ­century writes “back and forth” to an indenture-­ era poet from more than a c­ entury prior. As devotional songs “written” by poets

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from two ends of the indenture diaspora, the pain and sacrifice of indenture transplantation (in Sharma) is given new dimension as a poetics of transformation and translation (in Mohabir). My own reading of Holi Songs takes into account the importance of this text’s contemporaneity as double authored, as it ­were, and the spiritual importance this devotional songbook has to both indenture and post-­indenture imaginaries. While the poems do not expressly dwell on the materiality of poverty and colonial vio­lence, their treatment of exile as an indispensable facet of indenture being is an early enunciation of a poetics of re­sis­tance that strives to forge the complex contours of (post)indenture belongingness. Then and now, it could be said, more than words are sung—­rather, another India re-­membered within indenture diasporic terms. Twenty-­One Years was not written by Sanadhya but recounted orally over fifteen days ­after his return to India in 1904 to an aspiring Bengali journalist and government schoolteacher, Benarsidas Chaturvedi. ­Because of the text’s stridently anti-­indenture, thus anticolonial, message, Chaturvedi initially did not include his own name in the publication of the text for fear of losing his job as a government teacher, and it was widely assumed that its author was Sanadhya. This omission was corrected in ­later editions, with Chaturvedi listed as “editor.” First published in Hindi in 1914, Twenty-­One Years was subsequently translated into Gujrati, Marathi, and even Urdu, and, l­ ater, into En­glish in 1991. In his 1991 translation of the work, John D. Kelly offers that Chaturvedi’s influence may have been much more significant considering that Sanadhya, by his own admission, did not feel confident enough in his own Hindi. Chaturvedi admits that he “did collate facts and figures and embellished Panditji’s tale of woe. But even though the book was a coproduction, Panditji’s moral authority informs the text in ­every way,”16 and he mostly saw himself as an instrument to Sanadhya’s cause, claiming that he had merely “made the story wear pajamas.”17 When it first appeared, the work was catapulted to national fame for its role in effectively helping to end the indenture system (in 1917), and Sanadhya himself was tireless in his efforts to spread awareness about indenture’s atrocities. As we see from the narrative itself, Sanadhya’s voice constantly shifts between two modes, offering harrowing details of indenture to rouse Indians to protest the system alongside many examples of the indenture community’s strug­gles to survive their dehumanization through cultural preservation and reinvention. As already mentioned, Twenty-­One Years was almost forgotten a mere ten years ­a fter its publication, and Sanadhya’s other work, Bhut Len Ki Katha (or Story of the Haunted Line,18 published in the original Hindi in 1922), was never published in Sanadhya’s time and did not receive any attention ­u ntil the late twentieth ­century. The handwritten Hindi-­language manuscript was given to Australian scholar Ken Gillon (a pioneer in Fijian Indian history) in 1955 by Benarsidas Chaturvedi. Gillon, in 1980, gives the manuscript to his PhD student, Brij Lal. Haunted Line was translated and edited by Brij Lal and Yogendra Yadav

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(an Indian activist and academic) in 1995 and published by Saraswati Press in New Delhi, India. As Lal and Yadav suggest in their translation, the sole publication of Twenty-­One Years without Haunted Line, which came out almost a de­cade ­later, reveals the ironic silencing of the indenture’s own voice and concerns during India’s anti-­indenture po­liti­cal campaigns. At best, they argue, the former is a “selective reproduction of the material that Totaram narrated to Benarsidas” and more than Twenty-­One Years, they suggest, it is Haunted Line that gives articulation to the making of the hybrid “Fiji Indian” through the specificities of indenture experience that spawned a new society in Fiji, more egalitarian, more isolated, speaking a Hindi-­based lingua franca cobbled together from the dialects and languages the mi­grants had brought back with them. Totaram’s account provides a valuable introduction to the evolution of a distinctive Fiji Indian society.19

Lal and Yadav suggest that a fair amount of strategic omission was undoubtedly a part of Twenty-­One Years’s publication, as only ­t hose sentiments that would have “helped the anti-­indenture campaign” find their way into the text, and it is for this reason that Haunted Line “remained unpublished for so long, for ­here is a story that could hardly have furthered the anti-­i ndenture crusade in India” (101). The gap in years between the publication of Twenty-­One Years and Haunted Line can be seen to mirror the disjointed ways in which con­temporary post-­ indenture worlds continue to be studied even ­today. But, taken together, as they are in Lal and Yadav’s rendition, the two texts unequivocally demonstrate Sanadhya’s burgeoning diasporic consciousness, won­der and admiration for Fiji’s indigenous populations, their customs, and environment, and his growing discontent with casteism in the mainland.

Totaram Sanadhya Twenty-­One Years begins with the details of Sanadhya’s birth in the town of Hirangau in Firozabad, India, and the reasons for leaving his village ­after the death of his ­father. Immediately following this, Sanadhya introduces the scene in which an arkati (recruiter) approaches him in a market and convinces him to follow him to a h ­ ouse where he sees more than one hundred poor rural folk sitting in lines on the ground or cooking. The immigration officers, speaking a “­g reat deal of . . . ​slippery talk,” regale them with assurances of payment in exchange for field work in Fiji, a “heaven” of “­great bliss” (37), a place where they would “never have to suffer any sorrows [. . .] eat a lot of bananas and a stomach-­ full of sugar cane, and play flutes in relaxation” (36). Sanadhya proceeds to offer details of ­every stage we now know the indentured ­were forced to endure before boarding the ship—­examination by a medical officer, the commingling of “Chamar, Koli, Brah­man” during meals and in the sleeping quarters, and the

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constant misrepre­sen­ta­tion of details and facts to a largely illiterate crowd. On board, in a space of “one and half feet wide and six feet long,” they are given dog biscuits to eat, seasickness is rampant, and no thought or ceremony is given to the deceased thrown overboard. Notwithstanding the ample space Sanadhya gives to recounting the ills of the indenture system in Twenty-­One Years, sections that demonstrate his own cultural dualism and the cultural innovations of the indentured serve to underscore the indenture plantation communities’ radical anti-­caste consciousness, which Sanadhya insists is most urgently needed in India. As he shows, living as an indenture required the laborer to think outside of caste and religious doctrine in their new homes. Thus, for instance, to counteract the negative repercussions of the gendered quota system, which made both men and w ­ omen vulnerable to “crimes committed of the sort in which a man killed his wife b ­ ecause of misconduct and then hanged himself,” indentured Indians in Fiji had accepted (­widow) remarriage even though “not approved in shastra” (religious law) ­because it had “helped a g­ reat deal in stopping crime in Fiji” (75). Tragically, caste rigidity in the mainland also made it nearly impossible for the indenture to re-­enter the social fold. In the section “Fears About Caste in Returning to India,” Sanadhya refers to the girmit’s unfulfilled desire to return to the motherland b ­ ecause of their fear that “[w]hen we arrive no one w ­ ill have us join into their caste [and] [w]e w ­ ill be forced to suffer many caste-­insults t­ here” (71). Many who do go back to India are robbed of what ­little they have managed to save and “return(ed) to the islands” ­because their “countrymen” refuse to accept them back into the caste community. Again, Sanadhya is at pains to show how ex-­indentured persons are revictimized in India, having first been “fooled by the wicked arkatis [and] sent to a foreign country” (73), and then “[c]onvicted of the crime of the ocean journey” in their own homeland (72). Can the unfortunate laborer r­ eally be to blame for their own abduction and relocation overseas? Sanadhya asks, and what exactly “is the harm in mixing t­ hese ­people into the castes again? Oppressed by outrages of the home, what are the defects in this of t­ hese helpless ­people?” (73). Sanadhya’s condemnation against indenture is most explic­itly felt by the moral outrage and overwhelming grief he reserves for the plight of indenture ­women and their dual exploitation as workers both in the fields and in the domestic sphere, waking in the early hours to cook before ­doing hard l­ abor “and then having gone back to the h ­ ouse, make more roti” (69). In his many examples demonstrating their strength of character and daily acts of re­sis­tance (against both mate and colonial officer), Sanadhya explains that such examples are not related so that we may praise the courage and bravery of the w ­ omen, but to incite action in the mainland to save ­women from having to be in situations that put such extreme risk to their bodies and dignity. The chapter titled “An Account of the Life of the Indians Dwelling in Fiji,” for instance, consists entirely of the specifically dire ramifications of the gendered quota system. Sanadhya tries to show

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that the quota system had created a “shortage of ­women [and] is the biggest evil of all in the condition of the Indians [. . .] The result of this is that crimes of vio­ lence, abduction, adultery and so forth are commonly seen” (83). Not only are ­women beaten, murdered, and disfigured by men, but the men, too, suffer. Many commit suicide a­ fter their actions, ­whether from guilt and shame, or to escape imprisonment. In one example he provides, a ­woman named Narayani refuses to work a­ fter giving birth to a stillborn child and is “beaten so much that her mind went bad, and u ­ ntil now she has stayed crazy” (49). In “Outrages Against Kunti,” another chapter, Sanadhya again foregrounds the resilience and intelligence of ­women on the islands to depict the relentless nature of their strug­gles against rape and murder. Repeatedly subjected to sexual predation by white officers, Kunti is able to “protect her virtue for four years” (47) u ­ ntil a sardar and overseer arrange to give her a job far away from anyone, “where no witnesses could be found and no one could hear her crying” (48). Kunti wrestles f­ ree from the men and tries to drown in the river. She is saved by another Indian who happens to be in his dinghy at the time. ­After her rescue, Kunti arranges to have this incident written down and published in India in the hope that her story would incite outrage against indenture in the mainland.20 Again, Sanadhya’s outrage on behalf of Indian w ­ omen in Fiji informs his criticism of conditions back in India. As he says, “it is clear” that the majority of the w ­ omen on the islands ­were forced to escape “from arguments and fights with close relatives, and from improper treatment together with widowhood” in India (69): ­ ese w Th ­ omen who had never been out of their village in India, who d ­ idn’t know that ­t here was a country outside of their district, who are soft and tender by nature . . . ​­these ­women ­today, having gone thousands of miles away, in Fiji, Jamaica, Cuba, Honduras, Guyana and so forth. (70)

His inclusion of w ­ omen united in their strug­gle and strife everywhere indenture existed, encompassing, as we see in ­t hese lines, the Asia Pacific and the Amer­i­cas, is one way in which he attempts to widen the very meaning of Indian “brotherhood” and citizenship to include globalized indentured communities. As a member of the British Indian Organ­ization, Sanadhya helped or­ga­nize the collection of eigh­teen pounds “for our b ­ rothers dwelling in South Africa” during their campaign against new laws and taxes against ex-­indenture Indians (77). He also mentions examples from other indenture communities in Suriname, “Portuguese East Africa” (current day Mozambique), and Mauritius, to argue that torture did indeed seem to be the same everywhere on indenture plantations, though Fiji Indians are faced with “the amazing and sad ­t hing [that] we are treated worse in the British Colonies than in the foreign colonies” (120). Th ­ ose who are “proud to be born in the British Empire . . . ​­w ill be very ashamed to see that the treatment given to Indians in the Portuguese colony is better than that

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given to them in British colonies” (121). In Mauritius “the g­ oing of coolies” had been terminated and Indians ­t here now had a right to vote (87). Why, he asks, can the same not be said of Fiji? In Haunted Line, Sanadhya pre­sents himself as an enterprising and sensitive member of his community, keen to learn and to change his lot in life, even earning some amount of profit from his own sugar and banana plantations. ­After two years in Fiji, Sanadhya learns the native language, carpentry, metalwork, and sometime during his stay even takes up photography. Although no mention is made of how he comes to possess a camera or film for it, Sanadhya’s newly acquired skill lands him in no amount of trou­ble. He explains that he had learned photography so that he “could take pictures of Indians in the fields . . . ​in which white men w ­ ere beating Indian men and w ­ omen” (103). His idea was to have t­ hese photos published in the monthly newspaper Sarasvati.21 He is ordered to stop taking photo­graphs and threatened with punishment and imprisonment, but Sanadhya must have persevered. He mentions photo­graphs that ­were reportedly destroyed by government officers on his return crossing to India, and his camera is thrown overboard ­after he is discovered taking pictures of abuses on the ship. Throughout his time in Fiji, especially in the years following the end of his indenture, Sanadhya took it upon himself to be a sort of spokesperson of the Indian community, traveling to and familiarizing himself with all of Fiji’s plantations, learning the names of the laborers and their life stories (He was soon banned from this work as well.). He also served as the local correspondent to the British Indian Association, an organ­ization established in 1911 by Manilal Doctor, an Indian barrister and politician, to help safeguard the interests of indenture Indians in Fiji. He was remarkably attuned to the concerns of Indians overseas, and even traveled to nearby Australia in order to “know something about our Indian b ­ rothers living in other countries,” further stating that travel should be made to all “­t hese islands where Indians have settled” (109). Haunted Line contains frequent examples of Sanadhya’s deep re­spect for indigenous Fijians. Inclusion of his intimacy with them are strategic in that they help Sanadhya denounce the indenture system as if from an outsider’s perspective. In one especially poignant passage from Haunted Line, Sanadhya recalls the night in which he is rescued from committing suicide by a group of Fijian strangers who arrive at his home in the late hours searching for food. He has spent the previous days on an empty stomach while continuing to work on the plantations, and his despair is all-­consuming. Even reading verses of scripture has failed to help. At the moment he reaches for the noose, a loud knocking interrupts him and he is forced to open the door. When he tells the strangers that he has no food to offer, one Fijian points to a small quantity of rice in the pot, leftovers from an ­earlier meal Sanadhya had forgotten about. He hands this over to the Fijians, who leave promising to return. Within two hours, they come back

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bearing four sacks of potatoes and yams; Sanadhya is saved from starvation and vows never to attempt to take his life again. He is naturally most admiring of the fact that native Fijians ­w ill not accept “girmit” without forcing the colonial government to agree to their conditions for equitable pay, sufficient food, “soap, cigarettes, kerosene, blankets, and so forth” (66). In comparison, Indian “girmits” have a room mea­sur­ing “twelve feet long and eight feet wide,” are provided weekly provisions that last a mere three to four days with “two shillings and four pence” (43) docked for this fare, and are provided the aforementioned iron-­cast black pot for cooking. Of this pot, Sanadhya says, “praise . . . ​is beyond my abilities. Think about it. That black pot showed the blackness of the coolie system,” a “blackness [that] would never go away” no m ­ atter how much one washed it (97–98). This “blackness” is connected to Sanadhya’s overarching critique against casteism and casteist oppression, which he suggests the indentured population of Fiji had been proactive about re-­envisioning on the island. ­Because no help had come from India, Sanadhya suggests, the desperate situation of indenture Indians in Fiji had become a ­matter of urgency most keenly felt by indigenous Fijians, whose words Sanadhya quotes in the native Fijian language. Such passages capture Sanadhya’s incredulity at India’s seeming lack of concern for the injustices suffered by the indentured, and it is significant that he pre­sents his bewilderment by “speaking” in the native Fijian language. In such scenes, we may imagine that Sanadhya first dialogues with Chaturvedi in Hindi and then repeats/relates this in Fijian so that Chaturvedi can rec­ord his thoughts in both Hindi and native Fijian for the ­actual text. The layers of translation at work ­here—­between two translators, two languages, and from oral form to text—­ are striking instances of the indelibly culturally creolized worldview Sanadhya brings to bear on this work. What also cannot be denied is that in this deliberate use of a foreign language (Fijian) in a Hindi text, Sanadhya positions himself as a cultural translator while at the same time deflecting attention away from himself by providing the Fijians’ perception of India’s slow awakening to the injustices so clearly seen and felt by them. Sanadhya recalls one Fijian comment that “ ‘India is a bad country, whose w ­ omen come to a foreign country, Fiji, to do the work of labourers [. . .] If the outrages which are done to your w ­ omen [indentured Indian] w ­ ere done to our w ­ omen [native Fijian], then we would destroy to the roots the ones responsible” (70). In another scene, a Fijian lord is said to have approached a visiting dignitary from India, Chimman Lal (appointed to oversee the condition of the indenture), and asked him, “­Don’t you know that ­women of your country come to this country to work in girmit, and that upon them all sorts of outrages are committed? ­Don’t tears of blood come from your eyes when you see t­ hese ­women?” (96). Unfortunately, Sanadhya adds, no one was brought forward to translate t­ hese words to the visiting officer, even though he himself had been “standing b ­ ehind him” (96).

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What we see in ­t hese moments of tension is Sanadhya’s need to navigate between two sources of authority—­t he British and the Indian—­which eventually outline his own distinctive otherness to both. On the one hand, he blames the British colonial apparatus even though he remains admiring of its “justice-­ minded . . . ​government” (42). On the other, he appears most impatient ­towards his own “countrymen” from whom he expects more action and outrage. In the end, he finds, it appears that only t­ hose who have experienced indenture can truly see the exclusionary construct of Indianness in this period—­“We ­people, who consider ourselves subjects of the British Empire, are treated like this when we have left our homes in India. Then we open our eyes” (52). Sanadhya’s sense of the injustices only felt by the overseas indentured laborer are rooted in this suggestion that his eyes are fi­nally opened to the fact that the “we” he once considered guaranteed his inclusion in the category “Indian” no longer has room for t­ hose like him. How e­ lse, Sanadhya seems to won­der and suggest, have ­things been allowed to continue, and why e­ lse could “reform” be considered conscionable of a system that cannot be made good or better. Repeatedly throughout this work, Sanadhya calls out to the “educated population” of India to consider the plight of “­t hese suffering ­brothers” (40) of the motherland Oh my well-­educated countrymen! Have you ever thought about ­these ­brothers? Have you ever heard about ­these sons of this green, bounteous motherland who have been sent to other countries by the cruelty of the p ­ eople ­running the depots? Hearing the story of ­t hese ­people ­won’t you feel the lice crawling in your ear? (35)

Twenty-­One Years ends soon ­after Sanadhya recounts his return to India in 1914 with 833 other Indians. The last few sections contain selected passages from C.  F. Andrews’s 1914 publication in Modern Review,22 in which he echoes Sanadhya’s own comments about the need for India itself to do more to stop indenture recruitment on the mainland, this being more impor­tant of a focus than on hoping that “planters w ­ ill be merciful” (123). Most importantly, Andrews suggests, “other sins” must be abandoned—­“We should put an end to our inhuman treatment of the lower castes” (123). Of interest is that even Gandhi’s eulogy on Sanadhya’s death attends more to what o ­ thers gave to Sanadhya than of what this outstanding man himself achieved: Sanadhya “went to the Fiji Islands as a girmitiya,” Gandhi says, where “Dinbandhu Andrews found him,” ­after which “Benarsidas Chaturvedi brought him to the ashram [Sabramati Ashram].” Gandhi ends by stating that Sanadhya was “a strong Hindu [and] [o]n him was not even the smell of untouchability.”23 In spite of what Sanadhya himself found through his voyages, and of his many forms of po­liti­cal activism against indenture on Indian soil, Gandhi’s words return us to the stigma of caste “blackness” and the so-­called untouchability of being a girmitiya. In the end, Totaram

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Sanadhya, formerly indentured and newly repatriated, never could break f­ree from the casteist hegemony he returned to India to fight against. The passage from Andrews is followed by Sanadhya’s instructions on the “duty” of Indians and the government to end indenture. He invites the reader to write him with any information on cities with open depots so that he can personally go ­t here to stop innocent p ­ eople from boarding the ships: Readers! I have requested your help, according to my insignificant intellect [. . .] wherever a depot is opened, ­t here I should go personally, and according to my insignificant intelligence, tell about the suffering in the islands. (127)

He is of course a newcomer back in India and does not yet have enough intelligence about a country he has to learn about again. But to what end does he call himself “insignificant” twice in the last paragraphs of his narrative? Is this the rousing call of a lone activist who w ­ ill need a critical mass to follow him in his cause? Or is it strategically chosen to reflect this girmitiya’s cognizance of the fact that the ancestral stain associated with indenture has survived beyond the contract, that the indenture person (and indenture diaspora) has perhaps already become “insignificant” to a decolonizing India, and that the real end to the annihilations of indenture would require a much harder fight against casteist prejudice in the homeland? At the end of Twenty-­One Years, we are left with this image of a solitary man willing to fight against indenture practices single-­handedly if he must. Like the infamous iron-­cast pot given to plantation Indians for all their cooking purposes—­a “blackness” Sanadhya could never wash off, its perpetual emptiness mocking the worker’s hunger, its filth reminding the exile laborer of their complete alienation—­Sanadhya-­the-­returnee never sees himself as anything other than an agitator for other “coolies” against the “blackness of coolie system” (97). Through the words and achievements of this ex-­indenture, it is pos­si­ ble to see how the pejorative associations of this “black” stain—­t he stain of kala pani itself—­were being rescripted during the period of indenture itself and in the ser­v ice of a greater humanity. While this testimonio is a graphic display of Sanadhya’s burgeoning diasporic consciousness as an ex-­indenture whose ties to Fiji have clearly deepened since his return to India, its anticolonial and anti-­caste message are equally of import. More than destitution and excommunication, Sanadhya’s texts powerfully relate the so-­called outcast(e)’s grappling with alternate and new modes of being and belonging forming wholly outside of, and in distinction from, the mainland.

Holi Songs of Demerara/I Even Regret Night With the same unexpected serendipity that brought Totaram Sanadhya’s text on indenture in Fiji into the hands of Brij Lal, an Indo-­Fijian scholar of the Indo-­ Fijian diaspora, LalBihari Sharma’s work on indenture in then-­Demerara finds

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its next life through the voice of Rajiv Mohabir, an Indo-­Guyanese poet of the Indo-­Caribbean diaspora. Mohabir’s own reflections on Holi Songs speak to its relevance as a cultural inheritance that bridges indenture and post-­i ndenture worlds. In it, the resilience of the early indentured is undeniable and its existence incontrovertible evidence of “a new genre of devotional poem, one . . . ​ rooted in the Ca­rib­bean instead of India” (192). Sharma’s Holi Songs consists of a range of Indian folk poetic forms with roots in two cultural worlds, the spiritual and devotional world of sixteenth-­century Indian scripture and that of the plantation, and uses the forms “chaupai, chautal, doha, kavitt, ulara, and bhajan [which] each possess its own structures and history rooted in per­for­mance and narrative tradition.”24 What strikes Mohabir as the most exceptional feature about Holi Songs is the interweaving of the material real­ity of indenture with Hindu devotional poetry (bhak­ti), a subject he had himself studied in Jaipur and Varanasi. Mohabir is in par­tic­u­lar inspired to fi­nally have in his hands a text in which an indenture person demonstrates adeptness in a poetic genre conventionally associated with po­liti­cal democracy and re­sis­tance. Sharma’s skill and ingenuity with this form, as Mohabir suggests, resoundingly counteract the commonly held misconception that Indo-­Caribbean culture had always been completely severed from its South Asian roots to “rebuild their cultures in En­glish, the language of social prestige” (194). H ­ ere at last was a work that provided new generations of indenture ancestry poets such as himself the opportunity to reconstruct ties with the “very language [that] was not just ancestral but an a­ ctual ancestor” (192). In Holi Songs, the poet’s overarching mood, like that of a pining lover, moves back and forth between despair for the unattainable (be this god, beloved, or ideal) and emphatic expressions of the spiritual as redemptive. Pervading references to Hindu motifs, such as Krishna’s famed flute, the forest of King Rama’s fourteen-­year exile, and Brahma’s lotus face, intermingle with the rituals of life ­under the shadow of indenture, from mundane activities such as cooking rice or lighting a pipe to its more insidious nature u ­ nder plantocracy. Whereas ancestral religious references reoccur in the text, they are, like the divine, elusive. It is therefore the “forgotten poor,” indenture men and w ­ omen of the plantation, who world and p ­ eople a place brimming with the hope of spring through Phagwa festivities. Sharma begins the songbook by claiming his authorship and origins, saying that he is “LalBihari, the Beloved of Bihar,” who now has come to “live in the country/of Demerara” (29), where “my name [was] penned as ‘Coolie’ ” (35). Announcing this, Sharma introduces the “many provinces in British Guiana/ . . . ​ the wondrous village of/Golden Fleece in Essiquibo District” (31) and his own “villages Good Hope/and Good Intent [where] aru and pin/are plenty” (101). In addition to providing a geographic mapping of indenture villages, Sharma includes details of the harsh real­ity of life ­under indenture, citing Demerara as a “country of infinite ills” that has forced him into “[f]orsaking bhajans, forsaking

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dharma/the Ve­das . . . ​abandoned, to my disgrace” (35). The day begins at five in the morning with a small repast of “rice and yogurt boil/with sugar,” the laborers making sure to keep what l­ittle rice they can during the washing of the pot for a ­later meal (37). Such daily tasks are abruptly interceded by the arrival of the “sardar” (overseer) “bringing o ­ rders we must endure./ . . . ​Men and ­women join together/bearing hoes on their shoulders” (37) working through the day in “ragged clothes soaked” (39) for pittances, while at e­ very step the sardar assays their tasks and decides on their pay. “When I witness this,” the poet sings, “my entire body shakes. In Demerara t­ here are police/stations in ­every direction. O god, where have they taken and forgotten the poor?” (43). Such lines tether the songs’ other­wise joyful cele­bration of springtime and Phagwa to the world of indenture vio­lence and impoverishment in colonial Demerara. This poetic duality, in which pain and rejoicing speak coinstantaneously, is a power­f ul example of what Lal claims has been a too often neglected facet of the indentured’s attempts at self-­rehumanization and resilience.25 Only by attending to indenture cultural expression in their “songs, m ­ usic, ceremonies and oral narratives,” Lal argues, can we come anywhere near to understanding how at one level or another, the girmitiyas ­were caught between the demands and pulls of two worlds, one which they had left but not completely escaped, and one which they entered but not fully embraced. They had left one home and, at least emotionally, not found another in their own lifetime [. . .] They w ­ ere a ­people caught in-­between, neither ­here nor ­t here, or e­ lse everywhere all at once. (x)

The tussling between worlds described by Lal captures Sharma’s own repre­sen­ ta­tion of plantation life as some “in-­between” condition punctured by acute pain and aching desires. On the one hand, ­these emotions successfully relate the paradoxical duality of the diasporic condition, and, on the other, they underscore the importance of culture as preservation and salvific to indenture populations enigmatically trapped between nowhere (exiled from the motherland) and everywhere (as mi­grants). In several songs, intense longing for the elusive and unattainable is expressed through Radha’s pining for her beloved, the perennially absent Lord Krishna. In one song, the festivities brought on by the coming of spring have not abated Radha’s sorrow. The blossoming and blooming of flowers only sharpen her feelings of desolation. Honeysuckle, frangipani, marigolds, and buds of pomegranate “erupt as flames,” but Radha continues to grieve: “without my beloved,/ flowers slay me/ . . . ​­were he beside me,/he’d banish my fears” (89). In another, Radha says “I even regret night” for then “separation from my love torments me./ Without him/I have no peace” (93). In one especially heart-­rending scene, Radha’s despair becomes unbearable. From the early morning, she has been “dress[ed] as spring” bedecked with shiny jewels, but again Krishna is nowhere to be found.

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“­Don’t tell me any news/of him,” she cries, “­don’t tell me/I’ve wasted my life [. . .] My blouse bursts; my ­whole body aches for him. This distance between us I cannot bear. I am lost” (97). In such verses, the allegory of unrequited love delineates the dialecticism of indenture’s cultural continuum, in which longing—be this Radha’s pain at Krishna’s absence or the “chakora” bird’s plaintive cries to the moon26—­serves to characterize the productive and positive capacity of the indenture’s strug­gles to maintain their humanity in a land of “infinite ills” (35). Radha can be seen to embody the bereft motherland pining for her beloved, Krishna, whose per­sis­ tent silence connotes the absence of the laborer. Conversely, Radha’s words voice the suffering of the laborer keenly aware that “this distance between us” has left them “lost” (97) and with an indelible wound made by “the frozen dagger of distance” (131). When exile is specifically mentioned, as in the above-­mentioned song, the pain inferred in the phrase “this distance between us” is mitigated by the message of the rest of the song which tells of an abiding lover who sits and waits “watching for any sign” since the beloved has “stole[n] away to another country/without telling me” (103). In both cases, the emotions of Radha predominate and are sung as a way to memorialize and elevate indenture longing into the godly and spiritual realm such that absence and exile become sacred rather than polluting. Like lovers torn asunder, the indenture and their ­family are severed, but the songs teach that, despite the distance and in spite of the other’s silence, the departed is remembered and is the beloved. Sharma’s translation of indenture exile through devotional songs about transcendence thus captures the hope of t­ hose on the plantations who would find comfort in imagining that their families back in India long for their homecoming. Through song and prayer, poet and devotee sing back and forth communicating a shared pain that functions like an emotive bridge between bodies and locations separated by geography which now, with Mohabir’s latest translation, shifts the very center of an indenture poetics. As this twenty-­fi rst-­century post-­i ndenture poet from the Indo-­ Caribbean diaspora calls back and forth with the aid of an ancestor (both poet and language), the songs themselves draw our focus on colonial Guyana rather than India as the primary center of reference. As with Sanadhya’s text, it is in the instances of cultural density that we can locate this critical shift in Sharma’s creolizing consciousness and the blending of cultural worlds. This fusion is amplified by the songbook’s structural rendering in Mohabir’s design. As already mentioned, in the main section of Holi Songs, Sharma’s original words in the Devanagari script appear on the left page and Mohabir’s poetic rendition in En­glish on the right. In the final section of Mohabir’s translation, titled “Transliteration for Chautal Singers: The Tale of Demerara,” each page is split into two parts—­t he top containing a transliteration of Sharma’s Bhojpuri script into the roman alphabet then, below, its translation into Guyanese Creole. This manner of hybridized architecture allows the reader to

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both see and “hear” the transcultural fusion of motifs and imagery from both the old (India) and new (plantation Demerara) worlds, as in the following example of a song describing payday on a Saturday. Indenture-­specific words such as “manja drbaari” (Guyanese Creole for “man­ag­er’s t­ able”) resonate on the same page with “aayi” and “khusi,” which would be more easily understood by Hindi/ Bhojpuri speakers as “come” and “happiness,” respectively. The Guyanese Creole word “manja drbaari” verbalizes a specifically indenture experience and perspective while also blending in with identifiably Indian cultural practices, e.g., the w ­ omen’s head-­covering and the bright colors of Phagwa, that are a physical manifestation of the community’s transference of old world practices. The transliteration of this doha reads, aayi sanichar rangla, khusi nar naari ordhe panchrang chunari, chali manja drbaari (173)

The same doha in Guyanese Creole, Come Sati-­day, man an’ ooman all ovah jai. De ooman wear deh orhni wha’ get plenty colah an’ go corner de managah (173)

The literary En­glish translation reads, Come Saturday, men and ­women fi­nally make merry. Covered with orhnis, scarves of five hues, They approach the man­ag­er’s court (45)

The reader, moving back and forth between dif­fer­ent renderings of a single song, is offered an opportunity to engage in their own manner of call and response and experiences many variations of the “man­ag­er’s ­table” that come together in both Sharma’s and Mohabir’s re-­worlding of indenture experience and communion in Guyana. In this doha, what is of significance is the interplay of the translations “man­ag­er” and “court” in standard En­g lish, “manja drbaari” in plantation Bhojpuri, and “corner de managah” in Guyanese Creole. Th ­ ese serve to foreground the diversity of (linguistic) creations borne out of an experience directly tied to indenture and the plantation. As such, the poeticizations of both Sharma and Mohabir situate indenture at the center of this uniquely culturally creolizing landscape—­indenture ­labor (i.e., payday at the man­ag­er’s t­ able) is as if symbolically wrapped in the incandescence of creative rebirth as much as the laborers’ bodies are dressed in the colors of spring, and a scene relating planta-

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tion l­ abor nevertheless overflows with the anticipation of merriment. Thus, the repre­sen­ta­tion of exiled indenture men and ­women as khusi nar naari all ovah jai fi­nally mak[ing] merry

speaks in many languages not (only) of cultural annihilation or loss but more so of a collective jubilation as cherished cultural practices from the old world are reborn (at the onset of spring) through their rearticulation on sugar plantations in the colonial Ca­rib­bean. Collectively, the songs do not offer an escape from the physical materiality of indenture life mentioned in the lyr­ics, e.g., the poverty, hunger, vio­lence, and back-­breaking ­labor. More so, they read as instructions and guidance into a spiritual realm, reminding participants of their humanity so as to resist the daily, crippling dehumanization of indenture life. In many, the sacred entity or idea for which the devotee pines remains elusive, but in the very acts of prayer and singing the laborer’s old and new worlds are married precisely through desiring the unattainable. Sharma’s own voice is critical to this development. He often enters the song as a poet-­priest offering guidance and solace: “This ­whole creation is a dream-­/like illusion,” he says, and “[y]ou spent your life seduced/by the web of senses and time/and passed through the world/of ma­ya, of illusion” (87). Above all, he suggests, the allure of return itself is the biggest lie and the “ticket” (49) promised to the laborer ­after the end of their five-­year bondage may ­after all have been the most deceptive of all illusions: In this manner five years pass in steady woe. With a ticket, the heart, like a chakora bird, cries out to the moon. Such mirth! Some act as sadhus, some fakirs, wildly prancing all around, without any idea of what comes next. (49)

Joy at the thought of return is misguided, especially as the indenture contract, itself a one-­way “ticket,” deceived the laborers about their destiny. Why then, the poet urges, should t­ here be cele­bration when ­t here is no knowing “what comes next” and if the only surety is the pre­sent. In Holi Songs, what ultimately prevails is the suggestion that “India,” like the divine, remains afar and exile is permanent. The pain of exile, therefore, unfolds into a thoroughly new consciousness in which the very meaning of “home” is demo­cratized to include the land of so-­called impurity and banishment, the indenture plantation. Sharma’s

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songbook, like Sanadhya’s narrative, enriches our understanding of how cultural preservation and perseverance come together to forge the unique diasporic dynamism of early indenture communities. Sharma renders despair itself as the affective medium by which the exile infuses the immediate landscape with his or her longing and, thus, belonging. Through collective rapture and singing, furthermore, the exiled is involved in a productive communion with indenture pain so as to imagine a spiritual, if not physical, return to the homeland. Indeed, the prolongation of their own exile as indenture laborers neatly coincides with recurring scenes of loss, longing, and absences found in holy scripture. The rescripting of kala pani passage as a productive “blackness” in ­these early narratives takes us beyond the suffering and trauma of indenture life; what fi­nally emerges is the voice of the indenture—­strange, resilient, and utterly new. While the hardships of physical l­abor are characteristic features in both Sharma’s and Sanadhya’s rendering of indenture daily life, they both teach that return to the homeland is impossible and, even possibly, unnecessary. As such, both texts are critically impor­tant cultural repositories of indenture trauma that also delineate the strategic se­lections made by exiled groups who choose continual accommodation over return, and re-­memorying over anamnesis, to anchor new conceptualizations of indenture being and belonging elsewhere outside of and away from the mainland. The literary imaginaries of “contradictory Indianness,” which I examine in the following chapters in the writings of Ismith Khan, Harold Ladoo, and Shani Mootoo, similarly outline the symbolic and strategic pro­ cesses by which the writers navigate between competing definitions of Indianness and, by extension, Ca­rib­be­anness. In rereading their pioneering fiction, I specifically underscore the authors’ bold repre­sen­ta­tion of Indo-­Caribbean belongingness as emergent and as yet undetermined precisely as diasporic and new, which echo and continue a poetic legacy that can be traced to Totaram Sanadhya and LalBihari Sharma before them. The following chapters attend to the radical entry of an Indianness unmoored from and in excess of the ancestral, and are foremost an invitation to engage in an alternate methodology of reading fictions conventionally considered exterior to or in opposition to an aesthetics of creolization.

chapter 2

•

Repatriation and the “Indian Prob­lem” in Ismith Khan’s The Jumbie Bird (1960)

Whereas it is commonplace to view the 1950s and 1960s as a period of liberation, the po­liti­cal climate during decolonization did not in fact offer Indo-­ Caribbeans equal or automatic access to the rewards of postcolonial restoration and restitution.1 Newness and heterogeneity w ­ ere undoubtedly central to the po­liti­cal themes explored by all Ca­rib­bean writers of the period, but the configuration of the newness of the “West Indian” from an Indo-­Caribbean perspective has too often been received as inconsequential or as a separate endeavor. The latter view in par­tic­u­lar has reinforced the misleading perception that constructs of Indo-­Caribbean identity developed separately from, rather than in collaboration with, the West Indian. V. S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas (1961) speaks to this outlier position of Indo-­Caribbeans. In the very first pages, Mr. Biswas’s end as an “unaccommodated man” is already foretold so that the rest of the story itself reads as a chronicle of events surrounding one man’s desperate search for a physical home we already know he w ­ ill never have, and for a place in a society we already know w ­ ill be denied to him. In Samuel Selvon’s acclaimed novel written in 1959, Turn Again Tiger, as another example, the eponymous Indian protagonist also won­ders about his f­uture in the new decolonized West Indies. While talking with a friend about the promises this new period could offer the islands, Tiger is reminded of his difference as an Indian. When Tiger asks “What ­going to happen when all the island federate Joe?,” Joe responds that “all of them small-­island ­going to thrive off the big ones like Trinidad and Jamaica, that’s what g­ oing to happen” and adds the caveat that, “as for all-­you Indians, you better watch out, ’cause when we begin to federate it a­ in’t 71

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have nothing like vote for Maraj and Rampaulsingh, is only top men we want to federate we.”2 Though the narrative trajectory in Selvon’s work primarily traces Tiger’s gradual creolization into Trinidad’s larger, urbanized socio-­cultural order, this excerpt (and the work as a ­whole) exposes the decolonization period as one in which the idea of a f­ uture ­after in­de­pen­dence, for the “we” who ­w ill be served, has ­little room for Indians, and certainly not as “top men.” Published on the eve of Trinidad’s in­de­pen­dence in 1962, Ismith Khan’s The Jumbie Bird (Jumbie) similarly situates the complex birthing of an anticolonial Indo-­Caribbean po­liti­cal consciousness during decolonization and the short-­ lived West Indies Federation (1958–1962). Once overlooked within the Ca­rib­ bean canon in general, Khan has also been overshadowed by the prominence of his Indo-­Trinidadian contemporaries V. S. Naipaul and Samuel Selvon. While the latter traveled to ­England, the veritable hub of the Ca­rib­bean literary re­nais­ sance in the 1950s, Khan first went to Michigan (in 1948) and fi­nally settled down in New York City. It was t­ here that he began and finished his first novel, Jumbie, though, as he shares in one interview, the book was eventually published in ­England a­ fter numerous attempts to print it in the United States failed. Quite differently from his Indo-­Trinidadian contemporaries, Khan’s thematic attention to Indianness, indenture, and Indo-­Trinidadian po­liti­cal consciousness focuses on a Muslim Pathan3 ­family and includes the imprint of in­de­pen­dence in South Asia. Exceptionally in the Ca­rib­bean literary canon, even among other Indo-­Caribbean novelists, Khan engages in the act of “looking” to India to capture the contradictory pro­cess by which the “East Indian” becomes a new hybrid, the Indo-­Caribbean. To this point, the novel portrays repatriation (a contractual guarantee a­ fter the end of indentureship in 1917) as a debilitating desire that would mirror the violent fragmentation of the Indian subcontinent ­after in­de­ pen­dence in 1947 and nostalgia for the motherland as an obstacle to envisioning an inclusive Ca­rib­bean space. Positing “Hindustan,” the hallowed ancestral land of indentured Indians, as the principal contradictory sign, Jumbie imagines an Indianness unmoored from the subcontinent and firmly established in a newly forming Ca­rib­bean. Jumbie’s lateral inclusion of India thus underscores a transnational climate in which Indian identities in Trinidad emerge dialectically outside of the vertical binaries—­“White” versus “Black,” “Black” versus “Indian,” or “ancestral” versus “coolie”—in which prior associations of (post)indenture identity ­were positioned. Pivoting on the repatriation of Indians in the Ca­rib­bean during the 1950s, Jumbie documents a crisis specific to the pre-­independence years referred to as the “East Indian prob­lem”—­a phrase used by the colonial overseas office on the issue of repatriation for all Indians living abroad and which, as I ­will discuss ­later, disproportionately affected indenture populations in the Ca­rib­bean. As indenture cultural historian Brij Lal states

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Girmitiyas came late to the attention of historians and other writers, almost a ­century a­ fter the beginning of indentured emigration. Always, in one form or another, they ­were seen and analyzed as a prob­lem. To the missionaries, their religion was a prob­lem to be resolved through conversion [. . .] To the friends of India around the turn of the ­century, the girmitiyas and their plight ­were a blot on the face of India struggling to find its rightful place in the international community of nations. At the time of Indian in­de­pen­dence, overseas Indians ­were seen as a prob­lem in imperial relations. Still ­later, they w ­ ere viewed as a prob­lem in plural socie­t ies, to be solved through expulsion or po­liti­cal repression or enforced assimilation.4

The return of post-­indenture Indians did occur in small mea­sure from some islands, principally Jamaica, at the behest of the British Parliament. However, the initiative ­stopped suddenly without notice, leaving thousands, mainly in Guyana and Trinidad, waiting in vain for ships that never arrived. Repatriation for Indo-­ Caribbeans thus became a delicate issue that unfolded in a peculiar convolution. For one, modern India insisted that it was the responsibility of the British to solve the complications it had left dangling with its departure. The British government, however, was unwilling to make compensation for indentureship, officially holding the view that it was a product of the greed of merchants and traders and thus not a state responsibility. Ultimately, India and Britain agreed amicably to forgive and forget past transgressions, leaving Indians of the Ca­rib­bean to realize slowly the uselessness of ­labor contracts that promised return passage.5 The circuitous construction of Indianness offered in Jumbie is analyzed h ­ ere for its profound affinity with the poetics of contradiction and relation espoused in the works of pan-­Caribbean writers Edward (Kamau) Brathwaite and Édouard Glissant, who, though writing contemporaneously, are not typically viewed as Khan’s creative counter­parts. The search for Indo-­Trinidadian rootedness in Jumbie can however be read in dialogue with Glissant’s poetics of “Relation” and Brathwaite’s creolization to uncover parallels between the novel’s examination of Indo-­Caribbean belongingness and the writers’ shared meditation on the centrality of an open-­ended, inclusive creolization to anticolonial discourse. The death of the protagonist, Kale Khan, whose raging desire to return to India literally breaks his heart, demonstrates conclusively the novel’s examination of the urgent need of a f­ ree and plural Trinidad for Indian identities of all castes and creeds—­Pathans, Hindus, ­free mi­g rants, and ex-­indenture laborers. To this point, the novel’s hybrid symbology, i.e., the titular African jumbie bird and the Indo-­Trinidadian Muslim festival Hosay, pre­sents Kale Khan’s demise as the end of an old-­world order that allows for the redetermination of kala pani passage itself as new beginnings, especially for newer generations of Indo-­Trinidadians who have only ever known Trinidad. Subverting the jumbie bird’s association

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with bad luck in Ca­rib­bean my­t hol­ogy, the bird’s ominous calling on the day of Hosay signals the inauguration of a new culturally heterogeneous ­f uture that revises the failure of repatriation as a positive real­ity so that Trinidad, rather than India, is presented as the rightful site of belongingness for Indo-­Trinidadians. Jumbie’s unique global south paradigm, which contextualizes West Indian decolonization alongside India’s own in­de­pen­dence from the British Raj, serves to distinguish and disassociate the Indianness of a newly decolonizing Trinidad from that evolving in a newly postcolonizing South Asia. While my reading of Jumbie is attentive to the specific importance an Afro-­Indian symbology offers in Khan’s positive depiction of creolization, I also examine the latter’s significance in furthering the work’s vision of an anticolonial and transnational Indo-­ Caribbean consciousness freed from atavistic associations of the ancestral land, as is espoused by Kale Khan. In framing India’s own decolonization as exclusionary (i.e., the South Asian continent’s fracturing along religious lines), Khan pre­sents a productive negotiation with alterity and otherness in the Ca­rib­bean space out of which a newly emergent Indianness is effectively re­imagined outside of the erstwhile motherland.

The Jumbie Bird Jumbie portrays decolonization as a time of ambivalence and instability most acutely felt by its male Indo-­Trinidadian protagonists, the octogenarian Kale Khan and his son Rahim, and one of enterprise and promise most keenly anticipated by its principal female characters Binti, Kale Khan’s wife, and Meena, his daughter-­in-­law. In this explic­itly gendered portrait of decolonization, patriarchs rage and flounder in a new world of disorder and chaos they view as a threat to themselves and their male progeny, while matriarchs embody the positive and productive rewards of negotiation and accommodation shown as essential to the continuing evolution of Indian cultural identity in the Ca­rib­bean. As we come to see, it is through Binti’s unflagging resourcefulness and ingenuity that the ­family is saved from homelessness and poverty at the end of the novel; and it is all along Meena’s steadfast faith in the Surés (verses) from the Koran that provides Rahim the ultimate armor of hope he needs against the aggressive cynicism of his ­father. The male characters are most damaged by their own self-­perception as outsiders in a decolonizing Ca­rib­bean. Through the course of the novel, the Muslim Pathan Kale Khan (a former soldier turned jewelry maker who arrived in Trinidad in the 1880s) rises to island fame as the primary instigator demanding repatriation for Indians ostracized by the pro-­Black, Afrocentric rhe­toric underpinning the Federation era. A legendary island hero in his forties when he fought against the British in the 1884 Hosay riots and single-­ handedly shot down six mounted colonial officers, Kale Khan shows clear signs of dementia at eighty in his last efforts to demand Indian repatriation in protest

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against the government’s maltreatment of the Indian community. Coincident to ­these efforts, he grows increasingly distant from his f­ amily, particularly its female members. As rumor has it, before leaving India for Trinidad, he had forced Binti to abandon their first child, a girl, at a railway station. Also, for the past two de­cades, he had banished Binti from the f­ amily h ­ ouse, severing Rahim from his own m ­ other, ­because of his belief in the poisonous influence of w ­ omen. He had even ceased almost all communication with his own daughter-­in-­law, Meena, whose “coolie” ancestry he thinks has contaminated the Pathan bloodline of her son, Khan’s grand­son Jamini. While openly hostile about his daughter-­in-­law’s “coolie” heritage, Kale Khan’s closest friends and chess playmates are in fact all ex-­indenture men now left in a final irony to beg for any kind of menial ­labor to make ends meet. And though he is himself determined to return to India, he “hated India from which he had fled, and he hated Trinidad to which he had come to find a new life” (2).6 When we first meet Kale Khan, he is an indomitable figure who lives, as his daughter-­in-­law mocks, to keep the 1857 revolt alive,7 as if “the sepoy barracks [are] outside the door [and he is] keeping himself in shape in case of a skirmish” (2). Embittered by the realization that Rahim ­will never be a Pathan like his forefathers, Kale Khan pins all his desires and ambitions on his grand­son. Rather than have Jamini grow up as a social outcast like most other ex-­indentured Indo-­ Trinidadians, Kale Khan wishes to give his progeny a lasting gift by taking him back to India. Once ­t here, they could grow strong together, he thinks, “wrestling with the ele­ments side by side with the hill tribes of Hindustan, dwelling in the mysterious valleys of the Pathans, the last outposts that prevailed against all the invaders who swept past the centuries in Hindustan” (89). Jamini’s feelings when his grand­father promises to take him to their ancestral land are mixed. He is initially mesmerized by the prospect of being carried on Kale Khan’s shoulders all the way to Hindustan and excited by the promise of an adventure into unknown territory, which India is for him. At the same time, he cannot help but think that they would make a very lonely twosome. He inherently believes “Dada,” who vows to carry him personally, but he also predicts a sadness in the prospect of “never com[ing] back to Trinidad.” Kale Khan is unable to answer him when he asks, “Dada, we goin’ back . . . ​only you and me . . . ​you think we can carry anybody e­ lse when go back to India?” While the young boy trusts in his grand­father’s strength to carry him over, he also sees that the elder’s version of return makes no accommodation for ­others, such as his own ­mother and grand­mother, to be a part of this ­imagined ­f uture. This provocative scene does much to characterize Kale Khan. For the old man, his shoulders figuratively represent the Pathan traditions he believes are Jamini’s true inheritance. For the young boy, however, this act of shouldering includes the connotation that his grand­father’s back is firmly turned against both Trinidad and (much of) India, by which he senses the flaws in Kale Khan’s ­grand claims.

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Kale Khan’s pride comes from the fact that he belongs to Trinidad’s minority Muslim Pathan community, the members of which he claims are the only ­free mi­grants to the islands (specifically, as unemployed soldiers), unlike most other first-­generation Indians who came as indentured laborers. He habitually reminds Jamini that as a rare class of ­free mi­grants to Trinidad, the ­family’s value system is based on the bravery and honor of Pathans and is in ­every way superior to the contracted, lower-­caste sugar plantation workers. He includes in his diatribe a warning that Jamini’s bloodline has already been compromised by his ­mother and uses this to convince the impressionable twelve-­year-­old that returning to India ­w ill serve as a purification pro­cess necessary for his real destiny as a Pathan warrior. As he repeatedly reminds Jamini, “listen to Dada. You not come h ­ ere like the rest of ­t hese low-­class coolies in bond, you hear!” (3). Over time, Kale Khan becomes notorious among island officials who believe that if he “had told the three or four thousand pre­sent to stand on their heads, they would have done! [. . .] And now India’s High Commissioner to the Ca­rib­bean was arriving, as if some mysterious force had planned it that way, on the first night of Hosay!” (153). Kale Khan’s Indo-­Trinidadian followers come to believe that the numerous letters he has written to politicians in India—­sending congratulations for their newfound in­de­pen­dence from ­England while enumerating the unjust treatment of Indians in Trinidad—­would be successful in bringing a “representative from India who would see all the degradation they had suffered, who would right them, compensate all t­ hese wretched souls, take them back to their homeland—­Hindustan” (109). As Kale Khan tells the old men who collect around him, [w]hen this man [the Commissioner] come h ­ ere they go try to sweeten we up, but I go see to it that all the t’ings that happen to we reach back to we country, and besides that, they have to make arrangement to send all t­ hese ­people back, at their own expense. We work an’ sweat for that, ­don’t worry all you head, the time ­comin’ soon soon soon . . . ​It does take two hand to clap, you know, well, now is we chance. (169–170, original italics)

The motley crowd of old ex-­indenture men who collect around him provide a power­ful vis­i­ble backdrop as Kale Khan preaches to the crowds in Woodford Square about a “Hindustan” where they can reclaim all that has been lost or deprived in Trinidad. Th ­ ere, compensation ­w ill come for all the ways they, as Indians, have “faithfully [. . .] kept pace with their ­mother country, how they had never forgotten their homeland, and how true to the minutest detail they tried to preserve their heritage, their culture, their marriages, feasts, religion, and festivals” (153). The answer to Kale Khan’s call for repatriation, the Commissioner, is an Indian from the mainland and one quick to frame the displacement and disappointment felt by first-­generation Indo-­Trinidadians as a sacrifice for the cause

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of India’s postcoloniality. As the Commissioner would have Kale Khan understand, India views Indo-­Trinidadians as citizens of another place in time, and asks, “How many ­people in India know of your existence?” (170). The Commissioner’s suggestion that Kale Khan and his contemporaries are trapped in an anachronism is amplified by the latter’s use of “Hindustan,” rather than “India,” which highlights their remove from dramatic po­liti­cal changes in modern India.8 The arrival of the Commissioner makes clear that Kale Khan, having left Hindustan in the late nineteenth ­century, cannot hope to imagine or comprehend partition’s role in the fracturing of the continent and the deracination of Pathans, his own ethnic group, across three nations in the subcontinent (modern-­day Pakistan, Af­ghan­i­stan, and India). Indeed, Ismith Khan’s use of Hosay, an Islamic cele­bration, as the symbolic point of hope for Rahim and Jamini is explic­itly ironic given that the British empire used religion to partition the South Asian subcontinent in 1947 into three separate entities, the Muslim majority Pakistan and East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) and the Hindu majority India. As it becomes clear, the Commissioner has come with the express objective to reject Indo-­ Trinidadians reentry to the ancestral motherland, and to chastise Kale Khan for having “done wrong by inciting his ­people to rebellion, by sowing discontent among them, by promising them that they would go back home.” As the Commissioner explains to Kale Khan, he had “not been sent to Trinidad to revive old quarrels, that the past was dead and over, that India was no longer at odds with the British, and that India wished that they would s­ ettle ­here and try to make this place their home” (169). According to the Commissioner, Kale Khan and his followers should come to terms with the fact that Indo-­Trinidadians have been effectively forgotten in the busyness of India’s own postcolonial pro­cess. Efforts to reinitiate repatriation in the 1950s, the Commissioner adds, is not only an anomaly in the contractual terms of indenture but moreover excessive to the needs of a newly rising India, and their appeal to the Indian government to rectify a colonial fracture (specifically, paid repatriation) is seen as a “dead” and “forgotten” issue (151). The Commissioner personally visits Kale Khan at his deathbed and explains to Binti that he had not come to Trinidad as a fellow Indian but “as a stranger” who knew “nothing of our p ­ eople abroad” b ­ ecause India has had “too many ­t hings” happening of their own (178). In referring to the trauma of Partition—­what he obliquely describes as “too many other ­t hings”—­t he Commissioner highlights the immediacy of their displacement from Indian soil to suggest that occurrences in the Ca­rib­bean are too distant and alien. Even as an Indian in the com­pany of Indo-­Caribbeans like Kale Khan, the Commissioner is clear to position himself as a “stranger” to the indenture Indian diasporans, whom he views as outsiders of his own India. Historical specificity provides further meaningful subtext: the modern, in­de­pen­dent India that Kale Khan imagines can rescue the masses of poor and wretched Indo-­ Trinidadians is itself shown to be ideologically founded on the trauma of

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othering and displacement within its own territory. The Commissioner’s remarks about a Partition marked by religious segregation thus pronounce the characterization of a “new” Trinidad as a nation opening itself to new possibilities for ­f uture generations of Indo-­Caribbeans.9 While the g­ rand patriarch Kale Khan dreams of a return to India that he hopes ­will re­unite him with the pristine snowclad fiefdom of his Pathan ancestors, Binti, the banished matriarch who lives alone by the quarry and earns her livelihood selling coal, odd ground provisions, and homemade coconut oil and vinegar, continues to learn new skills in a changing Trinidad. In stark contrast to Rahim, whose jewelry business begins to wane with the introduction of machinery and mass production, Binti’s handmade goods eventually earn her enough gold sovereigns to secure Jamini a place in the prestigious Queen’s Royal College, in which he is one of only four Indian students. Having once courageously abandoned all ­family ties in India to pursue a new life together with Kale Khan in Trinidad, her steely determination and bravery remain intact. Indeed, she is the only character in the novel to vocally challenge the jumbie’s cries while the ­others cower and hide in fear. At the novel’s end, news of India’s refusal to assist in the repatriation of malcontent Indo-­Trinidadians breaks Kale Khan’s heart, and he dies knowing that return ­will never be a possibility for him. Kale Khan’s swift death on the final morning of Hosay suggests a martyrdom to what is ultimately presented as a hopeless and misguided cause. He dies having fought unsuccessfully for the po­liti­cal rights of post-­indenture Indians. His demise, however, removes the final obstacle standing between Rahim and Jamini and their efforts to believe in Trinidad as their home, as Binti and Meena have been encouraging all along. While driving back from the cemetery, “Binti was the only one not overcome with grief. If she grieved, no one knew it. She seemed to possess a new strength, a new vio­lence to take hold of Rahim, Meena, and Jamini’s lives” (182). Jumbie’s repre­sen­ta­tion of decolonization thus incorporates the legacy of the first wave of indenture ­women (such as Binti) who exercised their ­will, choosing to reinvent themselves ­after leaving India. On the eve of Trinidad’s own in­de­pen­dence, as sons and m ­ others fi­nally re­unite, Ismith Khan’s fictional West Indies surfaces as the only space in which diverse Indian identities can come together. Jumbie has more typically been read as an autobiography or a critique of the maltreatment of Indians during racial riots that marked the 1950s and 1960s in Trinidad. Such analyses, however, devalue the novel’s radical effort to creolize Indianness within a post-­indenture and anticolonial context. Numerous analyses of Jumbie focus on Ismith Khan’s personal life to underscore the work’s distinctiveness, specifically, that is, treating his migration to the United States (rather than ­England and Eu­rope) and his Muslim Pathan background as the primary reasons for his differing worldview. In numerous interviews, lines of questioning about his personal life in Trinidad and subsequent emigration to

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the United States dominate. One recurring point is that Khan’s own grand­father, who serves as a model for the novel’s Kale Khan, was a proud Pathan sepoy who ­rose to fame during the 1880 Hosay anticolonial riots in Trinidad. The author’s private correspondence with Arthur Drayton includes the fact that the grand­ father’s status as an “anti-­Raj, anti-­colonialist” figure was legendary in both Trinidad and back in India, and that Jumbie’s depiction of the “trauma and tragedy of indenture” was unparalleled especially due its attention to “Indians stranded [and] betrayed by the authorities . . . ​forgotten and discarded by ­Mother India” (248).10 In Drayton’s reading of the novel, “death and decay . . . ​associated with colonialism and [Kale Khan’s] impending death, signalled from the first page of the novel, marks the entire narrative and his ­actual death reads as a final sacrifice in the cause of anti-­Raj.” (249) I suggest an alternative reading that attends more closely to Jumbie’s unique global south paradigm, which contextualizes West Indian decolonization alongside India’s own in­de­pen­dence from the British Raj to deliberately invoke repatriation as an anachronism and to disassociate Indianness in the Ca­rib­bean from that of South Asia. Thus, the alterity and limbo of Indians in the Ca­rib­bean are presented as positive, even if contradictory, omens that mean that they are far from lost or “forgotten.” Kale Khan’s death, more than symbolic of the sacrifice (all) Indians must make against the Raj, as Drayton has suggested, can also be contextualized within a transnational paradigm in which concerns on the Indian mainland are peripheral albeit urgent to the immediacy of events locally in the Ca­rib­bean. On the one hand, the novel’s depiction of decolonization in the 1950s highlights the disenfranchisement and dispossession of Indians as a prolonged condition that stretches from the arrival of the first generations (such as Kale Khan and the homeless, destitute ex-­indentured men who live on Woodford) in the late nineteenth ­century to the continuing unease and instability of second-­ generation Indians, as we see in Rahim’s mounting psychological depression. The novel’s focus on the socio-­political persecution and maltreatment of Indians during decolonization, sentiments spearheaded by the octogenarian Kale Khan, may at first glance seem to challenge the pro-­Black, Afrocentric nationalism of the period. The impossibility of Kale Khan’s physical return is, however, essential to the novel’s overarching repre­sen­ta­tion of a burgeoning Indo-­Caribbean anticolonial and transnational consciousness forged through a negotiation between rejection and affirmation, both personal and po­liti­cal, between dif­fer­ent transnational Indian identities and not, significantly, one of Indian discontent against Afro-­ Trinidadians. Indeed, Khan’s repre­sen­ta­tion of Hosay as redemptive is critical to the novel’s challenge to viewing decolonization’s racial unrest and Afrocentrism as auguring only the exclusion and oppression of Indians, thus by extension excluding them from the exercise and promise of belonging in a newly redefining Trinidad. Though the Commissioner positions ­t hose like Kale Khan

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as strangers to India, the novel’s imaginary reconstructs the very idea of Indianness. Its Afro-­Indian spiritual syncretism develops an inclusive model of stridently anticolonial, even anti-­ancestral, po­liti­cal consciousness rooted in the Ca­rib­bean, with India merely haunting its periphery.

Afro-­Indian Symbology The po­liti­cal climate of the novel captures the mood of the 1950s and 1960s, de­cades of tremendous change and promise in the West Indies, in par­t ic­u ­lar Trinidad and Tobago, the designated capital of the short-­lived West Indies Federation (1958–1962), which was the fruit of the British Ca­rib­bean Federation Act of 1956. The Federation was intended as a self-­governing federal state comprising ten British provinces, with its headquarters in Chaguaramas, Trinidad and Tobago, and Queen Elizabeth II as its head of state. The city of Port of Spain became the po­liti­cal epicenter of anticolonial sentiments throughout the archipelago. Though the Federation promised freedom and equality for all, in real­ity it prolonged the region’s colonial de­pen­dency and gave rise to a period of intensifying racial hostility between ethnic Indians and Africans, particularly in Guyana and Trinidad.11 This fraught po­liti­cal context is offset by Ismith Khan’s use of Afro-­Indian symbology, the ominous Afro-­Caribbean jumbie bird and the Indo-­Trinidadian Muslim festival of Hosay, to signal the emergence of a new creolized Indianness opening itself to improvisations in the Ca­rib­bean. The novel’s titular bird, the jumbie, embodies the complex and contradictory components that define Khan’s pre­sen­ta­tion of this burgeoning anticolonial Indian consciousness. While the jumbie takes several cultural forms in Afro-­Caribbean communities, its varied and sophisticated rearticulation at ­every point of its contact in the Ca­rib­bean archipelago embodies the idea of creolization as a pro­cess in unexpected returns. Unshackled from its original meaning, the jumbie’s continuing evolution instantiates at once the continuity and power of translation through transplantation. ­Whether used to refer to a type of percussive drum (also “babala”) played using Irish-­African techniques, a ritualistic stilt-­dancing in high carnivalesque style, e.g., Moko Jumbie (with connections to Yoruba culture in Nigeria) or a malevolent spirit (similar to duppy),12 the jumbie’s divergent meanings in the Ca­rib­bean combine both positive and negative associations very similar to obeah.13 The mythological jumbie bird is generally considered to be of Bantu origin, and in Afro-­Guyanese culture a harbinger of death personified by the common black bird thought to reside in the inauspicious silk-­cotton tree. Despite the negative connotations associated with the jumbie’s nighttime callings, however, for the privileged few who are gifted with a sighting of the bird, the omen is positive. Before the novel begins, in the prologue, the jumbie’s symbolic importance is accentuated through a third-­person omniscient perspective that appears to speak for all who come within earshot of its cries. From the calabash tree that

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sits somewhere in Woodford Square,14 where Kale Khan and his f­ amily reside, the jumbie calls out daily—­“darken[ing] the night with its “twee-­twee twee-­twee [. . .] The night filled with curses and oaths . . . ​hurled at the unseen bird, its . . . ​ message of death” (xvii). ­W hether young or old, lovers frolicking in bed, or homeless and downtrodden, all are united in their fear: “Bird go away . . . ​you are the bastard child of devil and whore . . . ​drown your calls in the bottom of the Ca­rib­bean Sea . . . ​do not come perched in the Calabash tree with tidings of death crouched in anonymity” (xvii). Fi­nally, on the morning of Kale Khan’s death, on the last day of Muharram, the bird shows itself to Jamini. The jumbie’s self-­revelation to Jamini on this specific date symbolically fuses the association of death from Afro-­Caribbean my­t hol­ogy with that of rejuvenation from a Muslim Indo-­Trinidadian festival celebrating the incoming new year and the commemoration of the martyrdom of the prophet’s male descendants. Hosay (also Hussay or Hussein), named a­ fter the prophet Muhammad’s grand­son and a cele­bration commemorating Muharram (the day of his death at the b ­ attle of Karbala), was brought to Trinidad by Indian Muslims. The annual festival Hosay did give Islam its “­great[est] visibility” in Trinidad, but “Islamic culture and practice” in the Ca­rib­bean more broadly “cross[ed] ethnic divides, drawing their congregation from a wide mix of p ­ eople.”15 Indeed, historically, the Islamic religious traditions in the Amer­i­cas stretch back to the sixteenth ­century and in the Ca­rib­bean, specifically, ­were practiced by Islamic populations from West Africa brought to the region during slavery.16 In the early years of indenture, Hosay festivities involved stick fighting and floats, gradually evolving on the plantations as an interracial cele­bration that included non-­Muslim Indians, African drummers, dancers, and other participants no longer allowed to celebrate publicly ­after a colonial ban was issued in 1881. Hosay’s cultural and historical significance as a cultural transplant to the Ca­rib­bean, as Frank Korom claims, is that the Muslim Indo-­Trinidadians’s gradual relinquishment of full owner­ship of Hosay effectively opened it up to include non-­Muslim and Afro-­ Trinidadian members. As a continually negotiated cultural expression, having already creolized in its migration from Persia to South Asia with the Mughals, Hosay is an example of creolization within a “continuum” that allows for the “maintenance and change of ethnic identity” and its “double per­for­mance” by insider members responding to and resisting outside pressures to assimilate and creolize (201, 208).17 By explic­itly “celebrating diversity,” Korom suggests, Hosay was able to survive in the national public realm through its changing persona, despite the fact that this produced an internal schism between Shi’ah and Sunni Muslim Indo-­Trinidadians who differed in their interpretations of its practice and, in par­tic­u­lar, the role of Hosay (195). As Korom’s documentary fieldwork explains, it is only the Shi’ah who believe in Hosay’s martyrdom as “redemptive” (201) and who practice the ritual of submerging the tadjahs (handmade mausoleums in honor of Hosay) in the sea, the latter clear evidence of one impor­tant

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Hindu influence to the cele­brations. Additionally, the brightly painted tadjahs of the Ca­rib­bean are an exception in Islam’s traditionally minimalist aesthetic and can be seen as another example of Islam’s syncretism with Hinduism. Their destruction and submersion in the sea are meant to “symbolize . . . ​ the vio­lence of this moment in Islamic history [the murder of Hussain, Prophet Mohammed’s grand­son] and the transience of life.”18 ­These specific interpretations of Hosay are faithfully reflected in Jumbie. As Kale Khan takes his last breath, jubilant pro­cessions make their way to the ­water to offer tadjahs in memory of the sacrifices made by Hosay. At the same time as bedecked mausoleums are offered to the sea, the jumbie comes as a harbinger to Jamini, auguring the youn­gest generation’s release from a stigmatized past. No longer an omen hidden in the calabash tree, the jumbie bird appears to the young boy “perched in a tree.” Jamini sees the “bright yellow of [the bird’s] breast, the light brown of its back and tail, and when it opened its beak to call again, he could see the pink of its throat, and its ­little pointed tongue” (163–164). The boy’s sudden vision of the bird in its minutest details is an impor­tant contradictory omen—he w ­ ill be heartbroken to find out that his grand­father is ­dying but at the same time realizes the need to begin healing relations with his own ­father and ­mother. He ­w ill no longer need to believe blindly in a past that has never been his and can instead start to explore the land of his parents, which he can eventually come to view as his own. The gift of sight afforded to the novel’s youn­ gest protagonist, that too on Muharram, a festival of baptism, recasts Kale Khan’s demise in hopeful terms. Coupling Hosay and the jumbie, Khan translates the bird’s conventional association with bad luck in Ca­rib­bean my­t hol­ogy so that the bird’s calling signals rebirth and revelation, primarily for Jamini, the youn­gest member of the Khan h ­ ouse­hold, himself hybrid in unpre­ce­dented ways. ­Free of Kale Khan’s control, Jamini can embrace his multiple Indian identities— he is of both “coolie” and warrior (Pathan) ancestry. This rich cultural synthesis in the novel’s denouement pre­sents the end of one era (Kale Khan’s) as the beginning of another (in Jamini), only pos­si­ble in Trinidad. This complicated cultural nexus as well controverts hegemonic associations of the “dark w ­ aters” with corruption and annihilation, recalling kala pani’s other real­ity as a site of potential and prospect for many of the first generations of indenture populations, an inheritance Ismith Khan portrays as sustainable by new generations. In Shalini Puri’s reading of Jumbie, it is argued that Islam in the Ca­rib­bean served as “a common point of reference for p ­ eople of African and Indian descent” and as such did not enter the public realm as rigidly Indian but as a “secularized assertion of pan-­Indian cultural nationalism and pride [and] an emergent Trinidadian cross-­racial cultural and class solidarity.”19 Puri in par­tic­u­lar notes Khan’s exceptional treatment of Hosay as the “site of strug­gle” for national identity jointly ­shaped by Africans and Indians during colonialism.20 In spite of this thoroughly convincing line of argument that ­favors Khan’s ultimately hopeful

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portrait of interracial hybridity and re­sis­tance, Jumbie does not in fact engage with or include Afro-­Trinidadians and their perception of decolonization, and Hosay is not, in the novel itself, presented as the site of “joint black and Indian” re­sis­tance. Indeed, notably exceptional in the novel is the near absence of Afro-­ Trinidadian characters, its exclusively Indo-­Trinidadian perspective, and, strikingly, its inclusion of post-­independence India as aporia. Moreover, Khan’s complex transnational framework, one in which Hosay’s productively inclusive intra-­Indian creolization in Trinidad clashes against modern India’s exclusionary politics, poses a direct challenge to the very idea of “pan-­Indian” constructs of Indianness in which post-­indenture populations are denied presence or voice. Khan’s portrayal of the synchronous emergence of the postcoloniality of Indo-­ Trinidadians and Trinidad explic­itly subverts the idea of kala pani passage as annihilation, rather presenting decolonization as the historic moment in which the category “Indian” is opened up to include an anticolonial, pan-­Indian consciousness that is rooted in the Ca­rib­bean. By extension, Jumbie’s challenge to the historical view of “coolie” as polluted—­a view that Kale Khan advances and which both Rahim and Jamini reject—is a critically impor­tant contribution to challenging hegemonic repre­sen­ta­t ions of Indian diasporas, which typically occlude overseas Indians of indenture diasporas. In this vein, Khan’s portrayal of decolonization marks it as a period of potential in which Indianness is set along a new cartography that includes the alterity and subalternity of post-­ indenture populations in the Ca­rib­bean. Moreover, as Indians of the indenture diaspora, for whom the very meaning of Indianness is necessarily and continually creolizing, Ismith Khan’s new generations of Indo-­Trinidadians come into their own terms of “arrival” as Indians in the Ca­r ib­bean. What Ismith Khan leaves deliberately vague is ­whether the existence of multiple, and perhaps even incompatible, Indian diasporic identities need remain in constant antagonism. Khan’s fusion of Afro-­Indian my­t hol­ogy is something unfamiliar in mainstream Ca­rib­bean lit­er­a­ture of the period, which may explain why much of the scholarship on the novel focuses on its Indian ele­ments while ignoring its titular subject, the African mythological jumbie bird, thus making it difficult to discern the specific promise the aesthetics of creolization has in his repre­sen­ta­tion of Indo-­Caribbean anticolonial re­sis­tance. While Khan’s treatment of the relationship between cultural creolization and becomingness is unpre­ce­dented in Indo-­Caribbean writing, ­these ideological tenets are in fact in close alliance with Glissant’s and Brathwaite’s definitions of anticolonial re­sis­tance as a signifying pro­cess of ceaseless discovery through transplantation and interculturation. Glissant and Brathwaite’s pioneering texts make clear that competing definitions of creolization plagued the theorization of the concept from the outset. To the extent that t­ hese authors’ methodology and style appeared contentious to their peers, Khan’s own interpretation of creolization must have appeared equally strange and deviant, perhaps even more so since his work predates theirs.

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In the preface to Contradictory Omens: Cultural Diversity and Integration in the Ca­rib­be­an, published in 1970, Brathwaite opens by admitting that his vision of creolization ­will frustrate easy categorization, a useful reminder of the inherent complexity of his theory. Playfully, Brathwaite cautions that his statements should be spared from seeming to come from a dazed and “raptured West Indian . . . ​d ripping with the tropical sun” (5).21 He clarifies that the seamless “sharing and inter-­lapping” of Ca­rib­bean geography (a clear precursor to Antonio Benítez-­Rojo’s “repeating island”) make necessary his vision of the theory as thoroughly contradictory, especially so as to distinguish creolization from more familiar concepts that pertained to “African or North American notions of cultural diversity and integration” (5). Perhaps as a way to stress the importance of creolization as a pro­cess, Contradictory Omens ends with four words and a missing punctuation mark: “The unity is submarine” (64). The absence of the period, as the final sign of the text, lays accent on his discussion of creolization as an incomplete pro­cess, and “not a product,” which combines the difficulty of “ac/culturation” with the spontaneity of “inter/culturation” (6). While the former refers to the forceful “yoking” of the “slave/African to the Eu­ro­pean,” the latter was an “unplanned, unstructured but osmotic relationship” that followed out of the acculturation between the African/Eu­ro­pean. The binaries Brathwaite employs ­here help explain why this work is primarily known for its contention that the twentieth-­century Ca­rib­bean is predominantly caught between “White” and “Black” cultural contexts. Though not always given credit for his radically inclusive theorization, Brathwaite’s conceptualization of creolization includes the importance of “­little traditions,” such as the Indian and Chinese, arguing that a collective approach to t­ hese “ancestral cultures” practiced in new spaces ­w ill be what “take[s] us forward” in the pre­sent, ­toward the ­f uture (61). Indeed, Brathwaite’s argument advances the idea that the “truly creole form” ­w ill continue to shift and change such that this too w ­ ill be “assaulted by (or called upon to respond to) new waves of cultural incursion: the Chinese and East Indians” (6). While Brathwaite acknowledges that cultural diversity in the Ca­rib­bean is mainly “black rooted or oriented,” he suggests that this may be “accidental . . . ​a trend, fashion or opportunity rather than an offered norm” (6). The arrival of Chinese and Indians can thus be seen as a complementary, rather than aberrant, stage that leads to emancipation. Since complete re­sis­tance was impossible as a m ­ atter of survival, Brathwaite views “Indo-­Creole” identity as a singular product of “selective creolization” ­because it had to combine old and new cultural practices (54). Insofar as unpredictability is the goal, however, any cultural norm associated with the Ca­rib­bean ­w ill be productively “cracked, fragmented, ambivalent, not sure of itself, subject to shifting lights and pressures” (54). Expectation of anything ­else would result in a hardening pro­cess for which Brathwaite pointedly uses the imperial symbols of “crown: jewel: diamond” (58). The indentured Indians’s closer connection to their ancestral culture, which was

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absent and/or forbidden to slaves, allowed Indian groups to resist adopting new cultural models in the Ca­rib­bean and to preserve ­t hose transported from India. The contiguousness of cultural contact, in Brathwaite’s model, unites the legacies of slavery and indenture as part of a single evolution, or continuum, that both cracks and connects continents. For Brathwaite, remembrance that leads to nostalgia, especially one that provokes a desire to return to the ancestral land, perpetuates a negative consciousness whose source lies in colonial oppression/ suppression. Alternatively, the act of “looking” t­ oward the i­ magined collective past, be it in Africa, Syria, China, or India, is a first step in the creolized individual’s realization that only the Ca­rib­bean can be his or her true home. By “looking to India,” he stresses, Indo-­Caribbean culture opens itself to assimilation with Afro-­Caribbean culture while at the same time importing and pro­ cessing Indianness for its redefinition in the Ca­rib­bean. Indeed, Brathwaite lays emphasis on seeing the “cultural incompleteness” of all of postcolonial Ca­rib­bean society: “we remain part creole, part colonial, seeking many-­ancestoried conclusions,” which becomes an “ultimately co-­operative” endeavor for all cultural groups in the Ca­rib­bean who are joined in the exercise of self-­determination (55). Like Brathwaite, Glissant too begins the chapter “For Opacity” in The Poetics of Relation by acknowledging that his statements ­were originally, in the 1970s, ill-­ received and viewed as a type of “barbarism” b ­ ecause they appeared to renounce the princi­ples of visibility and agency deemed essential to postcolonial identity in the Ca­rib­bean (189).22 Glissant’s undermining of the transparent is however a mistrust of the hyper vis­i­ble (that is, colonial), a quality Brathwaite symbolizes in the bejeweled imperial crown. For Glissant, postcolonial subjectivity required a new ontology based on opacity, a beingness wholly impenetrable and uncontainable by the panoptic gaze of authority. As a truly freeing princi­ple, the “right to opacity” was defiance against the politics of exclusion generated by the panopticism of the dominant power (190–191). The practice and belief in the right to opacity inform, according to Glissant, the exercising of a subaltern intersubjectivity that can escape the gaze of the authority so that formerly colonized groups can freely “coexist and converge, weaving fabrics” without fear of surveillance (190). In essence, previously imposed divisions would collapse as ­humans fi­nally engaged in “discover(ing) what lies at the bottom of [all] natures. . . . ​This-­here is the weave, and it weaves no bound­aries” (190). In Glissant’s hopeful view, the fabric of a submarine collective humanity is “the real foundation of Relation” that unites all mi­grants to the Ca­rib­bean, the coincidence of their arrival from multiple points of departure producing a new form of coexistence created by postcolonial mi­grants that he refers to as a “this-­here.” For Glissant, the unstoppable mixing of cultures, like Brathwaite’s “osmosis,” sets into motion the unpredictable weaving pro­cess that imagines connections between geo­g raph­i­c al spaces and geopo­liti­c al communities in defiance of po­liti­cal state bound­aries. Brathwaite’s particularization of creolization as an

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unfinishable and unpredictable pro­cess thus closely parallels Glissant’s view of anticolonial re­sis­tance as unexpected “Relation.” The latter is a form of creolization based on an anarchic weaving pro­cess driven by the “imaginary,” which Glissant defines as “thinking thought [that] spaces itself out into the world” (3). To Brathwaite’s model of spontaneous and perpetual movement, Glissant adds the anarchy of rhizomatic, nomadic thinking that allows ­people to take the “risk” of seeing and being in new ways. Glissant’s evocative use of the earth’s hidden, enmeshed root system (the rhizome) is a meta­phor for postcolonial Ca­rib­bean consciousness as lateral entanglements ­towards a “knowledge becoming,” thought itself always en route. Advocating for a revised signification of the valence of exile, a trope and experience previously reserved for the colonizing subject, Glissant proposes that the original exile experienced by the colonized forced out of the ancestral land is in fact one step in an ongoing journey driven by a “search for the Other” (18). The imaginary of the nomadic postcolonial, who travels as much spatially as in the realm of thought, thus runs afar “from anything totalitarian” ­because the nature of this wandering is to take up the “prob­lems of the Other” as a way to “find oneself” (18). ­Here, Glissant introduces the exemplary practice and writings of fellow Martiniquan, Frantz Fanon, as a “striking” example of his proposition, showing that in Fanon’s path “from Martinique to Algeria [is] the image of the rhizome, prompting the knowledge that identity is no longer completely within the root but also in Relation” (18). By developing deeply h ­ uman relations with ­people, places, and ideas once withheld and/or forbidden ­under colonial rule, the mind itself is successfully decolonized by maintaining its search for self-­knowledge and self-­consciousness in relation to otherness. Within this regional debate, Khan posits a vision of creolization centered on post-­i ndenture history and experience. Khan’s own exploration of “looking” engenders a form of rhizomatic thinking that displaces the hegemonic rootedness of India—­the ­g reat unknown for second-­and third-­generation Indo-­ Trinidadians—so as to privilege speculation on the birth of unpredictable forms of Indianness in the Ca­rib­bean. This contradictory pull of time is ostensibly engaged in Khan’s decision to impose multiple, competing Indias and Indians onto the Trinidadian landscape: “Hindustan,” the hallowed ancestral land revered by the older generation; “India,” the modern post-­independent nation state; and the as-­yet indefinable Indo-­Caribbean forming alongside a new Trinidad. Importantly, the poetics of creolization is critical to the novel’s optimistic conclusion that new generations in Trinidad can embrace the incompleteness of the decolonization period as a positive sign, the setting of the novel on the cusp of national in­de­pen­dence reinforcing the point that an open-­ended and inclusive creolizing imaginary is essential to the ­f uture of new generations. In essence, both Brathwaite and Glissant imbricate the psy­chol­ogy of contradiction at the center of rebuilding identity, community, and nation to highlight the complications that come from contact between colonial ­others histori-

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cally kept in antagonism. Ismith Khan’s interrogation of creolization and decolonization is similarly involved in underscoring contradiction as organic to the birthing of a new Indianness in Trinidad. Jumbie’s lateral inclusion of India is ultimately a refusal to envision a newly forming Trinidad in which ancestral and hegemonic Indian colonial ­orders predominate. Rather, Khan re-­presents the period of decolonization from the perspective of Indians for whom creolization is a necessity for strategizing belongingness in the Ca­rib­bean. Nostalgia for the ancestral homeland is, on the other hand, an obstacle to envisioning an inclusive Ca­rib­bean space while at the same time a destructive imitation of India’s own colonialist fracturing along religious lines during Partition. Importantly, Ismith Khan’s engagement with multiple competing India(n)s shifts the center of negotiations in the very meaning of Indianness so that the perspective of Indo-­Caribbeans is privileged against the voice of the motherland (as represented by the Commissioner). The depiction of repatriation (Kale Khan’s mission) as an expense beyond the means of the impoverished ex-­indenture and as an anomaly operates within the novel’s transnational complex to explic­itly challenge the view that “return” was a right immediately accessed by the indentured, suggesting instead that the continuing stigma of otherness felt by ­ex-­indentured populations can be overturned by Indians themselves. Physical return to India, as opposed to the more philosophical or imaginative acts of looking, has, a­ fter all, always been predicated on caste and class terms. Not only was repatriation an expense very few could afford to pay, social reinitiation ­a fter traveling overseas was only accessible to t­ hose able to afford the elaborate and expensive rituals upon return. As Kale Khan constantly reminds his followers, “Who—­tell me who—­make enough money as long as they live h ­ ere to pay a passage back to Hindustan?” (152). Jumbie defines decolonization as a critical juncture of hope and rebirth for Indo-­Trinidadians who must fi­nally accept the mainland’s continuing inferiorization and stigmatization of (post)indenture Indians. My reading thus suggests that Khan in fact attempts to distinguish between differently emerging anticolonial Indian identities in South Asia and the Ca­rib­bean. Though decolonization in Khan’s novel is presented as a time of tremendous t­rials and tribulations for Indians, it is ultimately the threshold on which belongingness in the region can fi­nally be negotiated by Indians beyond India. The use of three generations who each have a differing view on belongingness, moreover, allows the reader to see the existence of multiple, and all equally au­then­tic, versions of Indianness with a center of reference outside of India itself.

Whose India? Reading Jumbie’s portrait of decolonization from within a global south framework underscores the text’s examination of the continuing legacy of the “coolie” stigma not only in Trinidad but also in the context of India’s own exclusionary

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policies. This focus effectively denies India its centrality to constructs of post-­ indenture identity and places indenture history as the main point of reference in the novel’s exploration of “whose” India m ­ atters. Ostensibly, it may seem as if Trinidad is the main obstacle to Indian belongingness as major plot points pivot on Kale Khan’s rallying efforts to resuscitate the need for repatriation to India, encouraging Jamini to come along and promote his cause not only in public squares and markets but also in “­little hamlets lost in the hills” where he would “read one ­after the other reports of punishments, reprisals, fines, legislations [and] laws which suppressed the learning of their own language, the passing on of their own culture and tradition, their festivals” (152). This climate of growing discontent is emblematized in the Red House, whose significance for Indians is complex. Its bold redness makes it an object of g­ reat fondness for the Indian community ­because “it reminded them of a Hosay, the papier-­mâché replica of their heroes’ tomb” (61). At the same time, however, the House was a power­ful reminder of their social illegitimacy “for in the musty parchments that the Red House kept, they did not exist, and if they w ­ ere questioned, they w ­ ere bastards in the eyes of the law, for ­t here ­were no rec­ords of their parents’ marriages ­either” (63–64). The old men living in cardboard shelters on Woodford Square, inarguably the h ­ uman “roots” Ismith Khan foregrounds as history’s “bastards,” have now become outlaws. Their “vacant f­ aces” trou­ble the “delicate feelings of the passers by,” and the newspapers soon chime in for calls “to comb them out of the corners of Woodford Square [. . .] who ­were a public nuisance, chewed betel-­nut and spat upon the walks, leaving the most nauseating stains on the cement” (19). The one politician on their side, the newly appointed young Governor, whose penchant for publicly “walking about in shorts” and chatting to any and every­body makes him a kind of pariah, is soon “sent back to the ­Mother Country” (20). What difficulties arise in Trinidad during this period become imbricated in Ismith Khan’s examination of the development of multiple constructs of Indianness regionally and transnationally. According to Mahim Gosine, u ­ ntil the 1990s the notion of impurity (or bastardization) remained attached to Indians of the diaspora by mainland Indians. In the case of “East Indian West Indians,” Gosine states, the idea of contamination as Indian Ca­rib­be­ans issued from their categorization as po­liti­cal outcastes determined through a troubled association with the Indian nation state during West Indian decolonization and the long-­ standing po­liti­cal tradition of nonintervention begun by Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first in­de­pen­dent Prime Minister, and continued by his ­daughter Indira Gandhi. Despite the gradual relinquishment of India as “motherland” or “homeland,” however, Gosine claims that Indo-­Caribbeans “find it rather difficult to break the bonds that bind them with India. In addition, they continue to glorify the traditions of their ancestors, and view the achievements of the latter with a certain amount of nostalgia.”23 Whereas Indian languages, m ­ usic, and other

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forms of cultural expression ­were held onto as a way to retain ties to India, with the definite end to repatriation in the 1950s, Indo-­Trinidadians began to look at Trinidad as “home.” But the relationship between India and its overseas indenture populations has always been a precarious one. Throughout the eigh­teenth and nineteenth centuries, Indian immigration to Africa, and in some cases to parts of the Ca­rib­ bean, consisted of voluntary migrations by skilled traders, merchants, domestic servants, ­etc., in addition to indentured laborers. Though pooled together ­under the colonial term “overseas Indian,” religious, linguistic, and other differences ­were maintained such that ­t here ­were distinct hierarchies endogenously among Indians of dif­fer­ent castes, religions, and class. Importantly, differences that would have been quite visibly established in India did not deter India’s rallying of its overseas populations as one unity in order to bolster its po­liti­cal presence globally, especially in the years preceding its own in­de­pen­dence. Thus, in fact, Kale Khan’s back-­to-­India movement and the Commissioner’s pronouncement that Indians in the Ca­rib­be­ans had been “forgotten” by India relates an impor­ tant historical juncture for (post)indenture groups especially. The loyalty and support of indenture populations was once considered integral to the shaping of India’s po­liti­cal ­f uture even if, post-­i ndependence, they ­were subsequently denied inclusion into the newly formed nation state. Whereas paid passage was revived by the Indian state to grant passage to some Indians in a decolonizing Africa suffering against the continent’s own pro-­Black campaigns, l­ ittle support was offered to ­t hose in Guyana and Trinidad, territories with the highest populations of Indian laborers in the British Ca­rib­bean, and, in the mainland, “coolie” history continued to be associated with stigma. As Kris Rampersad’s study on Indo-­Trinidadian lit­er­a­ture shows, Indo-­ Trinidadians had since the 1850s used the institution of the press, newspapers, magazines, and journals, to examine and interrogate “notions of community and identity that helped shape a national ideology” specific to Indians.24 Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, the development and devolution of several Indian presses hinged on the newspaper’s po­liti­cal leaning such that, by the 1950s, when repatriation was formally terminated, ­t here was a clear split between ­t hose that promoted the collaborative rhe­toric of Federation (such as Spectator) and t­ hose that promoted Indian nationalism as the only course for the community’s ­future ­after decolonization. The latter sentiment began t­ oward the end of World War I and continued over several de­cades, its peak coinciding with the “rise of the Gandhian nationalist movement [and] the consolidation of an Indian ­middle class who saw in insurgent India a symbol of self-­esteem [challenging] the dominant, essentially Creole (African/Coloured/Eu­ro­pean), construction of identity in the colony between the Wars.”25 This complex, while more pronounced in Guyana than in Trinidad, consisted of divergent Indo-­Caribbean “[c]onstructions of ­Mother India [. . .] inextricably intertwined with their relationship to the new space”

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though all pivoting on the image and idea of a deified Gandhi.26 Interchangeably called “bapu” (­father) or “mahatma” (­great soul), and given his instrumental role in indenture’s termination in the 1920s, Indians saw in Gandhi and in the Gandhian image of moral superiority a final opportunity to rid indenture identity (as “coolie”) of its lingering associations with degeneracy, mendacity, avarice, and backwardness. In par­tic­u ­lar, Gandhi’s anti-­casteist and multireligious teachings helped foster an unpre­ce­dented intra-­Indian community, overriding religious and/or caste conflicts that ­were once the norm. Such a community, it is worth noting, is in line with Ismith Khan’s preoccupation with intercultural and interracial dialogue and are themes he returns to in subsequent works such as The Obeah Man (1964). In Trinidad specifically, papers such as the Daily Argosy, The East Indian Herald, and The East Indian Weekly carried excerpts from Indian Opinion (Gandhi’s self-­publications in Natal, South Africa) and even missives from the Indian National Congress that ostensibly promoted pan-­Indian nationalism. While not all writings ­were equally favorable ­toward the emergence of an India-­centric nationalism brewing in the Ca­rib­bean, some gave prominence to the “Colonisation Scheme” ­imagined by the Indo-­Guyanese J. A. Luckhoo27 for a separate Indian colony within British Guyana itself. Though this never took any a­ ctual concrete shape, as Seecharan notes, “it was a manifestation of the emerging self-­confidence in the colony (some would have said arrogance), engendered by Gandhian idealism and the resurgence of M ­ other India.”28 Among Indo-­ Trinidadians, too, Kris Rampersad argues that “Gandhi’s vision gave Indians a common cause, in which they could forget their own animosities . . . ​India was the motherland. It evoked warm nostalgic pangs about its phi­los­o­phers, achievements and grandeur . . . ​[T]he Indo-­Trinidadians’ brand of nationalism [was] ­towards the ­mother, with repeated assertions of the need to reinforce the umbilical link; duty ­towards the Crown as part of a colony; and an increasing awareness that they w ­ ere residents of Trinidad [. . .] To them . . . ​t he three aspects seemed perfectly compatible.”29 The rise of Gandhi’s prominence and importance globally, coupled with India’s rise in po­liti­cal stature, thus catalyzed Indians everywhere in remarkable ways in t­ hese de­cades. Of special note is the fact that an intra-­Indian anticolonial solidarity was ­imagined as a real possibility for all Indians in a new, in­de­pen­dent India. Such constructions of “cross-­fertilization” between Indians, however, promoted the idea of India as the center while positioning diasporan indenture communities on the margins, and only peripherally Indian. ­Earlier between the two world wars, the Indian National Congress had slowly begun to assert itself as a global power pushing its agenda of home rule (“swaraj”) and in­de­pen­dence throughout its scattered populations. Indians overseas, especially the first wave of indenture mi­grants, such as Kale Khan, viewed Indian in­de­pen­dence in 1947 as the final overhaul of colonial practices standing in the

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way of their passage back to a homeland fi­nally f­ ree of its oppressor. U ­ nder the sophisticated Jawaharlal Nehru, the new Indian republic was being molded as a modern global presence, especially against its new postcolonial neighbors China and Pakistan. Its inclusion into the United Nations in 1945 (while still u ­ nder the Raj), in­de­pen­dence in 1947 (achieved before colonial territories in other continents), and subsequent entry into the Commonwealth helped establish this image. World War II and its aftermath had fi­nally “exploded the myth of white superiority and unleashed among the non-­Europeans the ideas of freedom and equality.”30 As well, whereas decolonizing efforts had in the past been segregated, ethnically and geo­graph­i­cally, into pan-­African (led mostly by W.E.B. Dubois and Marcus Garvey) or pan-­Asian movements, World War II was instrumental in undoing a final segregation so that ­t hese nations fi­nally began to “see” each other in a horizontal fashion. The October 1945 conference in Manchester, or­ga­ nized by the International African Ser­v ice Bureau (comprising mainly Africans and West Indians) was the first one to emphasize African, rather than only African American and West Indian, ­causes and also the first in which African leaders openly invited dialogue with Asian counter­parts, stating that the “centuries-­old chains of colonialism” could only be broken through an “Afro-­ Asian solidarity and [an] Afro-­Asian movement.”31 The fruits of this burgeoning Afro-­Asian po­liti­cal consciousness in the late 1940s crystallized in the Bandung conference in 1955, which also saw the entry of Nehru as a rising politician and India as a rising power.32 The first Bandung conference (in April 18–25 of 1955) took place in Bandung, Indonesia. In his foreword written close to a year a­ fter the conference, Philippine diplomat and intellectual Carlos Romulo remembers the conference as “a historical pageant, symbolizing the coming of age of Asia and Africa” (35).33 Twenty-­nine countries participated, all united in that they w ­ ere “exclusively the poorer and less developed countries of Asia and Africa, whose p ­ eoples together constitute more than half the ­human ­family, 1,300,000,000 ­human beings who happen to be non-­W hite and who shared, on the w ­ hole, a b ­ itter memory of Western control and domination” (3). Bandung operated u ­ nder a pointed racial exclusion as no nation considered “White” was invited, but, as Romulo presciently states, any “appearance of a color line [at the conference] was the result of a historic coincidence” through Western colonialism’s hand in the oppression of mainly non-­W hite populations (2). Bandung was one of the most critical entry points of in­de­pen­dent India’s attempts to exert its influence in the global south. Romulo points out that by the time of the Bandung conference, i.e., a­ fter India’s in­de­pen­dence and growing visibility in international politics, Nehru was a changed man who “cut an altogether dif­fer­ent figure from the serene, imperturbable man who deeply impressed delegates to the New Delhi Conference in 1947” (33). “The high priest of neutralism in New Delhi,” as Romulo calls Nehru, was a

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Con tr a dictory I n di a n n e ss highly cultivated intellect. But while his fellow delegates w ­ ere impressed by his culture and erudition, many of them ­were also jolted by his pedantry. His pronounced propensity to be dogmatic, impatient, irascible, and unyielding, especially in the face of opposition, alienated the goodwill of many delegates. ­Here was a conference which every­body thought would be dominated by him. (11)

Such strong apprehensions against Nehru may seem unwarranted given that Nehru was trying to promote what seemed like hallmark characteristics for world peace: “mutual re­spect for each other’s territorial integrity and sovereignty, mutual nonaggression, mutual noninterference in each other’s internal affairs, equality and mutual benefit, and peaceful coexistence” (83). Romulo’s ostensibly harsh criticism of Nehru’s “aggressively neutralist” stance, however, is in large part a response to the historical and po­liti­cal confidence India exerted internationally and which smaller Asian nations, such as Burma, the Philippines, and Indonesia, among ­others, did not yet have. India’s might was in no small mea­sure produced out of its tremendous mobilizing efforts throughout the territories (in addition to ­t hose within the mainland). Prior to India’s in­de­pen­dence, po­liti­cal representatives of the Indian National Congress ­were sent to visit overseas Indian populations to promote nationalist sentiment throughout the diaspora. The successful rallying of support among its scattered p ­ eoples in this cause united Indians regardless of caste or creed and helped to pre­sent India and Indians as a single behemoth-­like entity seemingly uncontainable by borders or seas. So successful was this, in fact, that even Indians in the Ca­rib­bean began to write about and see themselves as “multi-­ dimensional global individual[s] who [could] exist comfortably in the spheres of several nationalities or identities.”34 ­A fter in­de­pen­dence, however, the new government of India relinquished its support to overseas populations, in par­tic­ u­lar Indians of the indenture diaspora in the Ca­rib­be­an.35 By 1947, a new period began in which “Indo-­Trinidadians began to make concerted efforts to relinquish the motherland, to plant themselves more firmly in the landscape and forge a space.”36 As much as Gandhi’s prominence gave hope and promise to the indenture diaspora, Nehru’s ambitions inadvertently gave rise to what was called the “Indian prob­lem” among colonial circles and which eventually determined the fate of overseas Indians, particularly the indentured. As documents in the colonial archives show, India’s growing po­liti­cal power, amplified by its substantial population overseas, was viewed as a g­ reat threat to British colonial rule. In the 1950s, concerns about Indian nationalism ­were depicted as a population prob­ lem, which the British government articulates as being the greatest “threat” Indians posed to local po­liti­cal climates in Africa and the Ca­rib­bean. Specific danger to the African is seen to come from the Indian population’s so-­called pro-

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pensity for overbreeding and economic usurpation, all commonplace colonialist adages used pejoratively in reference to Indians almost everywhere in the colonies and especially t­oward indenture populations. As one colonial document from the National Archives suggests,37 though Indians had once been considered “essential cogs in the economic machine [. . .] u ­ ntil Africans are trained,” their population increase had made them “the largest single ele­ment in numbers, and their “domination [of] the economic field” viewed as responsible for the undermining of the “African and his proper place in the economic life of his territory” (1–2). In the section titled “Policy of the Government of India on Colonial Affairs,” the document goes on to state that the express objectives of the policy are, first, to “foster links between Indian communities in colonial territories and India itself while paying lip-­service in public to the princi­ple that Indians should integrate themselves into the territories in which they live,” and, second, to “build up the position of India as a champion of coloured ­peoples everywhere, and as the leader of ­t hose who wish to throw off the “imperialist” domination and achieve self-­determination and in­de­pen­dence.” In an oblique reference to the government of India’s pronouncements about purely perfunctory efforts at integration, the Secretary suggests that Indians should be encouraged to assert their po­liti­cal importance in the territories and that “[a]ny attempt to deny them po­liti­cal rights and opportunities similar to t­ hose given to other races w ­ ill result in the very situation which we want to avoid, i.e. that they w ­ ill look to India for their protection” (1). Explicit h ­ ere is the need for legislation to help overseas Indians establish themselves in their regional locales so as to thwart greater solidarity with rising India. B ­ ecause indenture contracts ­were widely considered the basis for the temporary nature of Indian residence, the high birth rate and economic prominence of Indians is presented as threatening, bolstering the idea that Indians ­were strategically using their numbers as a way to combat assimilation and assert their power. In east and central Africa, Mauritius, and Fiji, t­ here was apparently a “fear of Indian domination” while in British Guyana, Indians had apparently “increased self-­assertiveness [. . .] particularly marked since India received her in­de­pen­dence in 1947.” Evidence given by a “Guianese of African origin” states “their impression that many Indians looked forward to the day when British Guiana would be part not of the British Commonwealth but of an East Indian Empire.” In Trinidad, it was feared that Indians ­were “organising themselves po­liti­cally on racial lines through the Hindu Mahasbha [sic],” which is seen as preferable “both as the colony approaches self-­government and also in opposition to Ca­r ib­bean Federation, which East Indians dislike b ­ ecause it would swamp them in a unit with an overwhelmingly African population” (2). The Indian National Congress’s scheme to establish Indian Commissioners in the colonies, to ensure that Indians in the territories w ­ ere being treated fairly, was initially tolerated by the British government but soon viewed as highly

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unfavorable when it became apparent that the Commissioners w ­ ere defying their job description by advocating for Indian nationalism. The report specifically mentions the Indian Commissioner of Trinidad as having overstepped his rank by mobilizing Indians against the Ca­rib­bean Federation and the Commissioner of Mauritius for sharing his report on the maltreatment of Indians ­t here with the South African government, and it suggests that the Commissioners in east and central Africa be relieved from office for their “aggressive” attempts to instigate nationalist sentiment for India. Implied in this document is the concern that the Indian government was allegedly using the population in its ­diaspora to assist in Indian nationalism by fomenting anticolonial interracial dialogue and maligning British presence in the colonies. But historically, the introduction of Indians in all colonies in which indenture replaced slavery actually helped in the strategic creation of interracial tensions ­under plantocracy, which became necessary to deflect from empire’s insidious practices and inhumane treatment of all colonized subjects. As more and more colonies fought for and came closer to dominion status, racial antagonisms w ­ ere presented as being the product of Indian presence and their preponderance in numbers. The latter situation was in fact amplified by the Crown refusing paid repatriation to indenture populations, instead allotting them land and citizenship in their new homes. This cross-­oceanic spectrum of rapid decolonization provides insight into the enigmatic circumstances in which Indians in the Ca­rib­bean, such as Kale Khan and his followers in the novel, perceive of their persecution and otherness in the nationalist discourses of both a decolonizing Ca­rib­bean and India. Given this uniquely complicated transcontinental po­liti­cal maelstrom, Ismith Khan’s novel asserts that an Indo-­Caribbean consciousness must oscillate between loyalties in the transference from the ancestral home to the ­adopted one. Certain expressions of Indianness, that is, of the indenture diaspora, appear excessive ­unless aligned within already-­defined par­a meters. But, Jumbie’s portrayal of (post)indenture belongingness provides a remarkably inclusive rubric of its own and one unfolding in Trinidad. Perhaps Kale Khan, in spite of his loud remonstrations about Trinidad’s misuse of Indians and demands for immediate repatriation, has sensed this all along. Rubbing coconut oil on Jamini’s face and gazing deeply into his grand­son’s eyes, he feels the call of the unknown emanating outwards from him to the young lad: “This is my blood and bones . . . ​t his is my flesh, sewn together with the mystery of unending time. This is the seed of the unknown that I have drawn out from the soil . . . ​the seed that knows no end . . . ​the darkness ­shall not fall upon it” (11). Jamini, a “seed” ancestrally tied to Indian soil through his grand­father can, in fact, only begin to feel the mystery and promise of the ­f uture once ­free from Kale Khan’s dark presence. Fi­nally, it is the language and imagery of the text that steers f­ ree of the paradoxes and flaws in logic to which so many of the characters fall prey. The narra-

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tive itself, therefore, is the space in which we can most clearly discern the author’s attempt to stress the inevitable and convoluted psy­chol­ogy of the characters in their path to becoming Trinidadian. Interestingly, Kale Khan’s language and symbology very often betray a creolization he himself is unaware of or indifferent to. His creolized vision can be seen in his explanation of why he is altogether a dif­fer­ent type of Pathan. Unlike the famous Pathans legendary for skin as fair as the snow-­capped mountain range of their homes, so white that “one could see the swallow of the betel juice as it coursed through their throats,” he is “black . . . ​dark,” as is the meaning of his name “Kale” (3). The fact that Kale Khan sees himself as black amplifies his own susceptibility to altering his Pathan identity in regionally specific terms. Furthermore, it is Afro-­Creole symbology that helps him explain his view of a government system whose sole purpose is to rob ­people of their cultural history and cultural knowledge. Evoking the language of obeah, Kale Khan understands colonial government as a power­f ul malevolent force that in accumulating unsuspecting followers has become “a stronger ‘Obeah’ than anything we have” (90). Using the term “obeah” to evoke spirit possession, Kale Khan betrays his own creolization (never openly acknowledged) using an Afro-­Caribbean touchstone to define his perception of cultural and po­liti­cal corruption. Significantly, Ismith Khan points to both sides of the cultural associations of obeah in Kale Khan’s po­liti­cal analogy: it appears as both a native healing source and as a purportedly malevolent force outlawed by the colonizer. Kale Khan rants about the “En­g lish obeah” that has possessed the minds of young Indo-­Trinidadian returnees who “laffin’ and laffin’ at they own poopah an’ moomah; they t’ink is a shame to eat wid their hand, and they settin’ up their face when they see Indian food” (91). Though defending traditional cultural practices, the old man’s evocation of an “Indian obeah” as a corrective against western colonizing ones suggests his own imbrication in the discourse of creolization as re­sis­tance.

Becoming Indo-­Caribbean The contradictory and unexpected outcomes of creolization, as offered in Brathwaite and Glissant’s critical frameworks, characterize Khan’s depiction of the clash between dif­fer­ent constructs of Indianness that come out of the in­de­pen­ dence strug­gles of both India and Trinidad. Ismith Khan’s own repre­sen­ta­tion of creolization as an anarchic pro­cess involves imagining a newly hybridizing Indianness in a decolonizing Trinidad and not, critically, in in­de­pen­dent India. Kale Khan’s nostalgia for India is ultimately replaced by Rahim’s and Jamini’s hopefulness ushered by Trinidad’s in­de­pen­dence. The novel’s act of looking east thus incorporates a rhizomatic agenda that displaces the hegemonic pull of India—­the g­ reat unknown for second-­and third-­generation Indo-­Trinidadians—­ and recenters Trinidad as the locus of new, as-­yet-­unpredictable Ca­rib­bean

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identities. Kale Khan’s death is in this sense emancipatory in that it allows Rahim and Jamini to move beyond the former’s crippling dreams of repatriation to India so as to envision a larger map of Indianness that includes their creolization in becoming Indo-­Caribbean. Importantly, one reward engendered by localized forms of being and belonging is that t­ hese new generations in Trinidad embrace the incompleteness of the decolonization period as a positive sign. Contradictorily, the f­amily tradition of filigree, which Kale Khan learns in Trinidad and which Rahim learns from his ­father, becomes that which ­will fi­nally mark the younger generation’s differing positions on belongingness in Trinidad. As Kale Khan becomes intent on returning to India, he abandons the craft he had learned post-­passage and revives his identity as an Indian sepoy—­e.g., concocting mysterious herbal remedies and soups to strengthen his aging body, eschewing a mattress for a wooden plank—in readiness to fight his way back to the motherland. Rahim, on the other hand, w ­ ill continue to trea­sure this f­ amily tradition as a new inheritance and come to view it as a virtuous practice worthy of his pride. In the novel, the symbology of filigree jewelry making is the most power­ful pre­sen­ta­tion of creolization as a complex, contradictory, but ultimately coalescing pro­cess. Remarkably similar in design to Glissant’s image of the rhizome as an entangled root network, filigree becomes the meta­phorical gateway by which the young look back in order to move forward. The burgeoning diasporic consciousness of Rahim is likened to a careful weaving practice in which his first step, as a son, is to unlearn the hegemony of ancestral “Hindustan” epitomized by his ­father, Kale Khan. Significantly, as a handmade craft the former soldier learns in Trinidad and hands down to his son, filigree is an inherited skill that begins out of Kale Khan’s transformation ­after passage, a wholly new identity and livelihood that originates and thrives through transplantation. Rahim’s increasing m ­ ental agitation, culminating in an altercation with Meena a­ fter which she leaves the ­house (a clear echo of his own parents’ separation twenty-­five years ago), is fed by financial desperation. Having naively partnered with Mr. Hardacker to help pay the rent, Rahim subsequently finds out that the latter had actually ensured that only his name appeared in all the ­legal documents concerning owner­ship of the ­family’s jewelry shop. In addition to fears that he w ­ ill soon lose his ­family shop, Rahim finds it increasingly difficult to train new apprentices, who seem enthralled by the shininess of industrial products. On one par­t ic­u ­lar day, he overhears one proclaim, “man, they have machine up in ­England an’ Amer­i­ca that go do all ­t hese t’ings . . . ​t hen it go be easy for me” (55). He also discovers that it has become harder to attract young customers who “­were no longer interested in jewellery and the fine handwork from the best artisans. They preferred costume jewellery, coarse, gaudy, and flashy” (54). For Rahim, however, filigree represents a certain kind of hard-­won integrity, in the form of an artisanal skill, ­because it is handed down and learned from an older generation. As he tells one

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apprentice, “You have to make filigree fine, fine, fine . . . ​a nd strong, strong, strong . . . ​fine like spider-­web, and strong like iron. That is why you moomah and poopah send you ­here, to learn” (55). The art of filigree becomes for Rahim akin to a mode of thinking, a delicate tracery that teaches him the sophisticated psy­chol­ogy he needs to resist the militant warriorhood espoused by his f­ ather. Perhaps as once his f­ ather did, Rahim understands how to appreciate the strength of filigree as one of balance, the line “fine” as “spider web” but “strong . . . ​like iron.” As he sits alone in their shop on Woodford Square, Rahim comes to realizations of his own while gazing at a brooch he is working on. He sees the finished product as physical evidence of his knowledge and skill in making jewelry, but he also finds in it a power­ful meta­ phor of the contradictory impulses that he views as shaping his belongingness: “how much it meant to him to have each of its minute dots of metal s­ haped into perfect spheres, each sphere soldered on to a frame so that in the end, the intricate mass held together with the strength of a single bar of solid metal” (118). For him, it is the unity of the woven-­together “perfect spheres” that holds promise. Kale Khan, on the other hand, sees only disconnected spheres: a perfect “Hindustan” versus an imperfect Trinidad. With Kale Khan’s death marking the end of an old order, for Rahim, India is only one among many spheres connected to his now fuller sense of being and place. Through Rahim’s epiphany, Ismith Khan pre­sents filigree as a centrifugal formation that recalls the shape of transnational diasporic migration, in which center and periphery are not discretely assigned points even while indelibly linked. Filigree becomes moreover an alternative form of warriorhood in that its aesthetic princi­ples provide Rahim with the kind of psychological strength needed to begin the delicate work of rebuilding selfhood. Eventually, Rahim achieves his own moment of glory when a wealthy American man seeks him out personally to commission “the finest work from this area” (185). Losing home and workshop ­after Kale Khan’s death, the arrival of a stranger who trusts him with a generous cash bonus validates Rahim’s decision to continue the craft as a means of livelihood for his f­amily. As Meena says, “You is the best jeweller in the island, Rahim, only you, you is the only one who c­ an’t believe it” (186). Bolstered by this unexpected windfall, Rahim begins to come out of his dark gloom in anticipation for the ­future, “feeling that reward at the end of the day that only loving accomplishment can bring. As he lay in bed . . . ​a ll the small details of design . . . ​came cascading through his mind, he felt that he could go on and on, carried along on the wonderful tide of this new hope [. . .] that fleeting glimpse of eternity” (186). An altogether dif­fer­ent type of ­father, Rahim is thrilled by the prospect of Jamini attending a private school that w ­ ill open opportunities inaccessible to any other male in their f­ amily history. Rahim welcomes the unknowable as the best ­f uture for his son, perhaps to stem the cycle of burdensome dreams and

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desires transmitted by Kale Khan, from which he himself cannot ever be freed. At the novel’s end, Rahim encourages his son to let go in a way neither ­were able to when Kale Khan was alive. The last image of f­ ather and son portrays them on a bridge. Though they spend this moment sharing dark and disturbing thoughts on Kale Khan’s recent death and the uncertainty of their ­f uture, Jamini makes his ­father proud and happy simply by agreeing that he ­w ill search relentlessly for “that something that the world have for you to do,” what­ever that may be (190). ­There, they make a secret pact to set themselves adrift and to plunge ­toward a “lust [that] called from the unknown” (188). As such, the anarchic space of decolonization has throughout framed and foreshadowed the end of an ideological era with the death of Kale Khan. On the threshold of a wholly new, albeit unpredictable, f­uture, Rahim and Jamini no longer view themselves as exiled or displaced from India but as active agents who join in the birthing pangs of their true home, Trinidad. Ismith Khan’s alternative construct of Indianness, outside but not exclusive of India, deliberately robs our ability to see, know, or even imagine the kinds of identities the new generations represented by Rahim and Jamini are in the pro­cess of forming. Khan’s fictionalized version of creolization, which asserts Trinidad’s centrality to Indo-­Trinidadian cultural identity, is open ended, inclusive, and, fi­nally, transnational in a way that shifts the significance of Indianness outside its conventional borders. Trinidad’s imminent in­de­pen­dence, as the novel suggests, is a time of crossover that weaves India into a new, culturally heterogeneous f­ uture in the Ca­rib­bean. Khan’s multiple cultural syntheses revise the failure of repatriation as a positive real­ity so that Trinidad, rather than India, is presented as the rightful site of belongingness for Indo-­Trinidadians. The novel’s provocative repre­sen­ta­tion of creolization, one si­mul­ta­neously intra-­Indian and Afro-­Indian, delineates the complex paradigm in which a (post)indenture Indianness emerges out of its uncertainty both within the Ca­rib­bean and from South Asia. The Afro-­Indian symbology of the novel is a rebellious hybrid, as each part translates the other to suggest a bold new outlook for Rahim and Jamini, whose destinies remain unpredictable. In this, Khan ostensibly engages with the poetics of contradiction and ambivalence in creolization to capture the complex pro­cess by which the marginalization of Indians during decolonization unexpectedly serves as the catalyst for the emergence of a new diasporic Indian consciousness in a global south context. Specifically, Hosay and the jumbie, both cultural evolutions of passage, characterize the work’s unique poetics of creolization. Both are mythologies that, through migration, transform unexpectedly in the Ca­rib­be­an; as parts of a new w ­ hole in Khan’s literary text, they establish Trinidad as the center of a burgeoning transnational consciousness stylized as hybrid, and nationhood, like osmosis, as a slow pro­cess in which old hegemonies gradually open up to new identities, practices, and traditions.

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Ismith Khan dramatizes what Brathwaite calls the creation of the category “Indo-­Caribbean,” an integrative pro­cess in which an Indian in the Ca­rib­bean “looks” to the ancestral land in becoming Indo-­Caribbean. Khan’s novel explic­ itly “looks” to India, coupling the latter’s in­de­pen­dence with Trinidad’s own, in order to highlight the gaze of Rahim and Jamini who begin to see Trinidad as reconstructive and India as destructive. Jumbie’s repre­sen­ta­tion of decolonization moreover gives specific prominence to the emergence of a new Indianness bearing profound cultural, spiritual, and po­liti­cal affinity with the anticolonial sentiments of the Ca­rib­bean region. The clash between dif­fer­ent Indiannesses, both within the Khan ­family and between continents, initiates an impor­tant psychological negotiation in the younger generations who open themselves to perceiving of their own Indo-­Caribbean identity as a legitimate form of Indianness among multiple coexisting ones. Far from being a period of po­liti­cal paralysis or ostracization for Indians in the Ca­rib­bean, Khan reimagines decolonization as a ripe moment of unpre­ce­dented and unknowable outcomes, indeed the fitting context in which Indians emerge as indelibly Ca­rib­be­anized.

chapter 3

•

The Trope of the Rice Field in Harold Sonny Ladoo’s No Pain Like This Body (1972) Remember one-­third quota, coolie ­woman. Was your blood spilled so I might reject my history— Forget tears among the paddy leaves. The cry of coolies continue Dreams of a cow and endless calves, and endless real­ity in chains. Mahadai Das, “They Came in Ships”

Mahadai Das’s oft-­quoted poem “They Came in Ships” draws from indenture’s unequal treatment of w ­ omen u ­ nder the “one-­third quota” to elucidate the fraught trajectory of a peasant consciousness in which the “cry” of “coolie” servitude continues to be felt, if not always heard. Though calling on “coolie ­woman” to “remember” her treatment in this history, the poem leaves deliberately ambiguous w ­ hether this directive is to serve the real­ity of ­either the con­temporary or ancestral Indo-­Caribbean ­woman; for both, it would seem, remain victimized and rejected by a system that continues to supply dreams that shock against a “real­ity in chains.” Insisting on remembrance as a participatory act, however, the speaker nevertheless insists on imagining indenture as a continuity in which ­women’s lived realities on the plantation gives articulation to a new historical consciousness post-­passage and, even, post-­indenture. Das’s poem in this sense participates in Mariam Pirbhai’s radical definition of indenture culture as an evolving continuum “initiated by the traumatic and perilous journey across the kala pani and solidified in the experience of dislocation, indentureship and resettlement amid alien lands and p ­ eoples.”1 The extreme alienation of resettled rural Indians is an impor­tant point in George Lamming’s reflections on Indians in the Ca­rib­bean. As Lamming argues, 100

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“insularity” in his native Barbados, and more generally in the Ca­rib­bean regions, appeared to be “cultivated as a virtue” such that the island natives appeared not only isolated from one another through inter-­island rivalry, but also internally segregated in patterns that continued older forms of systemic oppression. Specifically, the invisibility of rural Indian peasants was the most striking example of what Lamming saw as the “careful and systematic cultural indoctrination” leftover from colonial segregation, despite the fact that Indian peasants had remained the “invisible hands” that in fact sustained the country.2 Whereas, he explains, “the only Trinidadians with a length of continuity are Indians [. . .] the only ones who could trace two or three generations born in this country,”3 he recalls that (in the 1940s) in his four or five years t­ here, the “Indian world” of Trinidad never once entered his own. Recalling the “totally black” ­faces of “African visibility,” Lamming states that the only time he saw “masses of Indians” in Trinidad’s urban spaces was during the early hours of the dawn when they came to sell fruits and vegetables. Lamming stresses that l­abor, as the “universal culture” of the Ca­rib­bean, in fact underscored the continuity of the rural Indian presence on the island and that, t­ here can be no history of Trinidad and Guyana that is not also a history of the humanization of ­t hose landscapes by Indian ­labour [. . .] This vision of a Ca­rib­bean civilization in which the Indian presence is no less Ca­rib­bean in its formation than that of their African comrades is the surest way of making our par­tic­u ­lar world a more ­human place. It is also the major contribution we can make to a universal culture. But it is not given; it has to be worked for; and it has at all times, to be defended.4

Central to Lamming’s call to continue (re)humanizing Ca­r ib­bean notions of ­labor and civilization is the importance he places on ­labor as the “foundation of all culture” through which the contributions and “presence” of all ­humans is made clearer. Lamming’s invocation of the intellectual l­ abor required to create, and defend, a more wholistic inquiry of the legacy of colonial ­labor in the postcolonial Ca­rib­ bean is a useful starting point for this chapter, which specifically attends to Harold Ladoo’s “work” to humanize the Indian rural presence by bringing it out of literary isolation and obscurity without, however, romanticizing or idealizing the cultural and social impoverishment of peasant lives. Ladoo’s rendering of Ca­rib­bean peasant life and (post)indenture culture in No Pain Like This Body is an exceptional and, for its time, rare depiction of the rural community’s creolization in contrast to their habitual repre­sen­ta­tion as culturally static and fossilized.5 Ladoo pre­sents a vibrant, if destitute, community whose rural isolation paradoxically allows for unpre­ce­dented forms of cultural creolization even as their prolonged alienation breeds a suffocating climate of violent and oppressive socio-­cultural patriarchy detrimental to the f­ uture and protection of its most

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vulnerable members. The novel’s central inversion, i.e., cultural evolution as rural, is key to Ladoo’s efforts to center pain and suffering as distinctive to rural peasants belonging among the Ca­rib­bean “paddy leaves.” As I suggest in chapter 2, Ismith Khan’s novel “looked” to the erstwhile motherland as a way to establish the unexpected pro­cess by which in­de­pen­dence in South Asia catalyzed the birthing of Indo-­Caribbean po­liti­cal consciousness during decolonization. In this reading, Khan’s pioneering novel is seen to attend to the positive rewards of repatriation’s failure in the emergent transnational and anticolonial po­liti­cal consciousness of Indo-­Caribbeans. This chapter extends on this paradigm of productive contradiction in Harold Ladoo’s first novel. Published a de­cade ­after The Jumbie Bird, No Pain “looks” back to the early years of post-­indenture and the strug­gle of rural Indians who chose to remain in the Ca­rib­bean in lieu of repatriation. Importantly, the rejection of return (Khan’s explicit theme) frames Ladoo’s own redemptive portrait of Indo-­Caribbean belongingness within multiple contingent conditions of exile—­from ancestral India, internally within the Ca­rib­bean as isolated rural peasants, and, as ­will be developed ­later, through second diasporic migrations to the global north. Specifically, it is in the novel’s symbolic conflation of indenture’s “new world” lands, i.e., the sugar plantation and rice field, and their repre­sen­ta­tion as sites of new belongingness that Ladoo locates the rural Ca­r ib­bean as a foundational space of post-­i ndenture belonging. In Ladoo’s fictional world, the plantation, which both figuratively and historically is conventionally associated with slavery and slave ­labor, and the rice field, most typically identified with the sociocultural world of agrarian Indians, are juxtaposed so that landscapes rarely viewed as inter-­connected are fused and histories of l­abor habitually placed in opposition (i.e., slavery and indenture) are presented as equal parts of the “universal culture” of l­ abor (Lamming) that has ­shaped the post-­Columbian Ca­rib­ bean landscape. Critically, the rice field, a transplant from Asia now thriving on the island, achieves both poetic and po­liti­cal potency in its function as the dominant signifier through which Ladoo reconfigures alienation as constitutive of its own form of belonging. The rice field is symbolic of belongingness in the novel through its association with the death and reincarnation of the eight-­year-­old Rama, who succumbs to complications from pneumonia brought on by the August rains. Rama’s death is significant to driving several plot events, but the final suggestion that he has returned to “live in da ricefield” is an explicit move to overturn the myth of return to the old world in ­favor of a new narrative of arrival and belonging in new worlds. Unlike the eponymous divine king of the Hindu epic Ramayana, who returns from exile and banishment to reclaim his throne in the kingdom of Ayodhya, the “return” of Ladoo’s Rama as spirit and into the rice fields effectively exalts the terrain introduced and cultivated in the Ca­rib­bean by indenture populations. The underwater interment of young Rama’s spirit in No Pain suggests that Ca­rib­bean paddy fields can denote more than an

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“endless real­ity in chains,” and that the so-­called temporary site of work ­under colonial indenture, the kar­ma bhumi (land of work), can become the land in which new destinies and new cultural forms are born in an alternate janma bhumi (land of birth) outside and beyond India. In this pointed inversion of  the Ramayana’s privileging of return and censure against exile, No Pain ­provides a counter-­narrative in which the space of the Ca­rib­bean island is re­i magined to include (post)indenture forms of being that directly challenge the framing of indenture persons as temporary transients awaiting final passage “back home.” No Pain’s provocative portrayal of rural isolation as agency and evolution also allows us to locate the significance of Ladoo’s repre­sen­ta­tion of the “peasant as citizen.” 6 Though Chakravorty is clear to situate his comments within the Indian colonial context, I find useful his argument that the writing of history is more than a “secular activity,” especially when concerned with a subaltern group whose actions defy the rigid separation of the spectral and spiritual from the po­liti­cal.7 Rather than view the subaltern peasant-­as-­citizen as a contradiction in terms ­because of its ill-­suitedness to Eu­ro­pean ideals of the rational metropolitan citizen, Chakravorty argues for an expansion of the category of the peasant, suggesting that the par­tic­u­lar fusions of their world offer an opportunity to “render [their] enchanted world into our disenchanted prose.”8 Chakravorty’s comments on the hegemony of social science discourses in historical studies of subaltern being and re­sis­tance bear striking resemblance to what I have previously described as the default application of so­cio­log­i­cal and biographical lenses, as opposed to rhetorical and narrative, to analyze Indo-­Caribbean lit­er­a­ture of the rural peasant. This chapter is thus similarly concerned with re-­enchanting the “disenchanted prose” and lenses conventionally used in interpretations and translations of the rural Indo-­Caribbean peasant in lit­er­a­ture. The republication of Harold Ladoo’s first novel by the House of Anansi Press (Canada) in 2003 markets it as a “ ‘ lost classic” in the emerging canons of Canadian and Ca­rib­bean lit­er­a­tures. But, much of the analyses on this novel dwell on the author’s dark vision and seem to erase the specifically (post)indenture rural peasant sensibility articulated in this debut novel. The autobiographical and/or psychoanalytical lenses often used to assess No Pain furthermore obscure impor­tant narrative and thematic features that inform the novel’s exposition of cultural creolization from a rural indenture perspective. First published in 1972, No Pain won a Canada Council Grant which, according to the writer Peter Such (Ladoo’s close friend and mentor), provided the funds for Ladoo to begin making travel plans to research the writing of a tripartite epic of Trinidad’s slave and indenture histories.9 He was to write one other novel, Yesterdays (published posthumously in 1974), also about rural Trinidad, before his death while on a trip to Trinidad in 1973. Allegedly, Ladoo was killed in an accidental hit-­and-­run though rumors still abound of a l­egal land rights ­battle that ended in his murder.

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A recurring point in much of the criticisms one finds on Ladoo’s short life and writing ­career is the tragic and mysterious circumstance surrounding the author’s unexplained death, noted as an ironic parallel with the specified cruelty in his fictions. The pervasive profanity and vio­lence in his fiction is often seen to reflect an unresolved personal rage,10 allegedly making it one of the bleakest and disturbing fictions in all of West Indian fiction.11 Echoing this, the Encyclopedia of Twentieth-­Century Latin American and Ca­rib­bean Lit­er­a­ture contains an entry for Ladoo’s No Pain with the editors’ prediction that the novel w ­ ill continue to be under-­studied due to the fact that it is “genuinely distressing reading.”12 Canada’s first poet laureate, Dennis Lee, said in his eulogy, “The death of Harold Ladoo,” that the writer’s inner turmoil fed a prolific writing habit that led to nine novels in three years and a “welter of manuscripts that kept surfacing year ­after year.”13 His personal life was apparently as chaotic as his writing habits—­caught stabbing a man, inveterate smoker, juggler of many odd jobs from a “bank-­clerk, dishwasher, writer, and professor” that kept him working day and night.14 His personality, too, is depicted as conflicted and confusing: “A skinny brown man in a suit—­voice tense, eyes shifting, absurdly respectful . . . ​and none of it connected: that raucous, raging t­ hing I’d read [No Pain] and this deferential man.”15 While most readings of Ladoo’s literary worlds concur that they are unparalleled and unpre­ce­dented in both Ca­rib­bean and Indo-­Caribbean fiction, his literary vision befuddles critics endeavoring to locate his aesthetic and literary influences. This is seen in the confusing tendency to acknowledge the author’s singularity as a Ca­rib­bean and Indo-­Caribbean writer, while tracing his influences within a conventional Euro-­American canon encompassing Jane Austen, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Samuel Beckett, Norman Mailer, and even Chaucer. At other times, Ladoo’s attention to the natu­ral environment is attributed to the naturalist par exemplar Emile Zola, regardless it seems of ­whether or not Ladoo had actually read his work.16 As well, perhaps due to a very short ­career as a writer, he has been misidentified as Guyanese17 and sometimes positioned as a Canadian writer,18 the latter an oddly precipitous move considering that Ladoo had lived in Canada less than four years and that repeated mention is made of his increased alienation and isolation in Toronto. At other times, Ladoo’s fictions are read as an attempt to exorcise an inner personal demon, such that, despite containing many unique technical innovations, the works are reduced to socio-­biographical recountings of Ladoo’s own harsh upbringing in Calcutta Settlement in the Couva district of Trinidad.19 In Wyke’s analy­sis of No Pain, for instance, the author is blamed for focusing on a very small fictionalized terrain, the plantation area around Karan Settlement, which, the critic adds, is clearly fashioned on the McBean village area where Ladoo grew up. The reader is given no “relief,” Wyke continues, nor allowed to see “the rest of Carib island;

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he [Ladoo] does not even bother to provide some point of reference for the urban Canadian reader.”20 According to Wyke, Ladoo cannot match the maturity of Naipaul, Selvon, Harris, or Brathwaite ­because of “the character and plight of the author—­a poor peasant upbringing ill-­preparing him for the strenuous demands of immigrant life in Toronto.”21 With no empathy on this count, however, Wyke concludes that the novel builds up to a nihilistic zeitgeist that ultimately “shocks our sensibilities, offends our taste and disappoints what­ever curiosities it may have aroused.”22 (I ­w ill return to why and how No Pain’s unflinching repre­sen­ta­tion of peasant poverty develops a relationship between indenture’s legacy of pain and post-­indenture diasporic consciousness). Reviews, categorizations, and interpretations of lit­er­a­ture, as Indo-­Mauritian poet Khal Torabully has explained, can often eclipse the significance of a work’s poetic vision depending on what kind of “audience” receives and writes about it, especially if it provides the first ever articulation of an unfamiliar subject. Serving as an in­ter­est­ing parallel to Ladoo’s case, Torabully gives the example of one of the first novels written about rural Indian life in Mauritius, by Marcel Cabon, which was initially interpreted as a “pastoral novel,” thus undervaluing the fact that the setting of the work is “dictated by the very nature of the ­people Cabon was writing about, that is, the Mauritians of Indian origins, the descendants of the coolies. The pastoral setting pervades his style and acts profoundly on the h ­ uman nature of his characters, and this is ­because the village is a highly symbolic place for coolitude, just as the mornes/mounts are for the p ­ eople of 23 creoleness.” One obvious similarity in the abovementioned reviews is that t­ here is something unseemly or excessive in fictions that portray the desolation and indigence of rural Indians (even if written by someone vocal about his peasant upbringing) or that immigrant fiction (even if written by one) distressing to the reader ­either should not be written or cannot be read as good (enough) lit­er­a­ture. ­There is also a refusal to place Ladoo’s literary imaginary within the purview of Ca­rib­ bean literary studies and a hesitation to broach the uniquely indenture cultural worldview at the core of Ladoo’s works. Thus, even when reviews point to his novels’ cultural Hindu context, Hinduism (not indenture po­liti­cal history) is presented as the root of peasant exploitation. Smaro Kamboureli, for instance, compares Ladoo’s style with “Faulkner and Hemingway,” but studies his writerly vision as mostly being about “the day-­to-­day demoralizing experiences of characters whose lives seem to be fatally sealed as much by their Hindu faith as by the colonial and social forces that surround them.”24 The myopic lenses hitherto used to analyze Ladoo’s work may be understood by the fact that his writings did not overtly align with the po­liti­cal and cultural imaginary of other lit­er­a­ture of the rural Indian peasant.25 Arguably, this has meant that his work has seldom been associated with the aesthetics of mainstream creolization in

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Ca­rib­bean lit­er­a­ture or, even, as charting an alternate terrain from the urban creolizing paradigm of lit­er­a­ture of the period. The dominant view that creolization is (and must be) an indiscriminate pro­cess of pro­gress and intercultural metamorphoses for all has meant that modes of being and belonging in the Ca­rib­bean that pivot on “failure” (as a “folk” ele­ment, in Brathwaite’s sense), as opposed to pro­gress, are both excluded from and viewed as irrelevant to ­matters of social, cultural, and po­liti­cal importance both in the local and diasporic contexts. As well, “failure,” as an indelible facet of peasant consciousness, is seldom viewed as a positive or productive symptom of plantocracy’s violent history that can offer alternative worldviews outside of and in opposition to the narrative of economic upliftment associated with expatriation. Ladoo’s own use of the idea of failure reframes the insularity and insularism traditionally associated with indenture poverty and destitution into critical facets of the rural community’s cultural innovation and perseverance. Indeed, against the idealization of migration as desirable and inevitably leading to purportedly richer pastures in the global north and west, Ladoo’s fictional worldview serves as an allegorical commentary on the perpetuity of exile, even for post-­indenture identities. In this sense, No Pain can be seen to offer an insightful framework linking two historical periods of significance to indenture history, the early years of Indian rehabilitation on rural plots in the early twentieth c­ entury, which is the temporal setting of the novel, and the mass migration of Indo-­Caribbeans to North Amer­i­ca during the race riots of the 1970s, when the novel was published. Indenture’s “endless real­ity in chains,” now extended by next-­generation migrations to the global north, thus shows diaspora itself as a site of pain that is, nevertheless, forged out of a search for belongingness. One remarkable instance in which Ladoo’s text on rural destitution finds its audience among the hidden “third worlds” of diaspora comes by way of another artist in exile belonging to an alternate migratory history linking Asia and Canada, the Filipino Canadian artist Lani Maestro, whose in situ exhibition, titled her rain,26 was inspired by Harold Ladoo’s No Pain Like this Body. According to Maestro, when she first visited the gallery in Downtown Eastside, an area infamous for its “con­spic­u­ous social and economic degradation, its blatant drug dealing and addiction, its prostitution, brutality, disease, homelessness, and systemic racism,” the words of Ladoo’s novel “came to [her] head.” As noted by the reviewer, “Trinidad’s Calcutta Settlement is a long way, geo­graph­ i­cally and demographically, from the Downtown Eastside [. . .] But perhaps it’s not such a ­great distance in the context of the legacy of colonialism. Nor is it distant in the ways poverty and cultural displacement affect how identity and perception are formed.”27 Suffering, h ­ ere, unexpectedly connects disparate worlds joined by the legacy of colonialism, in par­tic­u­lar the devastations that continue to be felt by the poorest groups in Canada’s other­w ise “first world” environs. Maestro’s work, in this

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context, helps to foreground the ways in which the contemporaneity of neo­co­ lo­nial­ist capitalism is lived through urban poverty, an environment wholly of its own and one in which the poorest “individuals evolve a sense of who they are in the world.”28 The pervading mood of Maestro’s piece is, in keeping with Ladoo’s own emphasis on the spiritual, one of meditation and contemplation. Ladoo’s brightly-­lit words are surrounded by sofas and chairs “turned introspectively” to create a “hushed, minimal, almost reverential” atmosphere where “[s]uffering hovers in the air like a ghost.” Bright neon signs with the words “NO PAIN LIKE THIS BODY,” and its inverse “NO BODY LIKE THIS PAIN,” flash and c­ ouple with reflections of vehicles and pedestrians seen through the glass walls of the gallery. In this way, Maestro explains, spaces within and without converge to capture the “particularity” of Hastings Street, Vancouver—­Canada’s so-­ called “poorest postal code”—as it converses, as it w ­ ere, with Trinidad’s own poorest region. The Toronto-­based Trinidadian poet Dionne Brand, in her introduction to the latest publication of No Pain, similarly turns to the idea of failure to capture what she views as Ladoo’s attempt at reinvention through art.29 As she says, for all the marvellous turns of imagination that allow ­people to survive history’s arbitrariness, one is not always successful at it. One fails. Ladoo’s [No Pain] tells of just such a failure. The novel is a Veda to the beginnings of Indian life in Trinidad. Life in the not so imaginary Tola Trace. A life of the barest subsistence and what must have seemed abandonment by the gods. Ladoo by this act, by the writing of a hymn to ­t hese origins, thought that he could reinvent himself.30

The novel does indeed, as Brand suggests, attempt to situate the origin of “Indian life” in the rural Ca­rib­bean. And, while it lies beyond the scope of this inquiry to won­der if this novel offered the writer himself a chance at reinvention, Ladoo’s art does appear to operate within an indenture poetics expressly attuned to the ways in which material impoverishment and cultural complexity operate hand in hand for rural Indians in their Ca­rib­bean new worlds. The novel’s explicit reworking of the Ramayana myth, as I ­w ill discuss ­later, points to No Pain’s importance as an alternative myth or hymn of origins, as Brand puts it, concerned with redefining and redetermining kala pani’s legacy of “burden” and “bondedness”—­negative connotations that linger from the colonial ste­reo­t ype of the “coolie” as destitute laborer. Bondage, an indenture theme, is however key to Ladoo’s repre­sen­ta­tion of the productive cultural context in which the characters’ relationship to one another and the land on which they now live and work informs their sense of place. The novel’s highlighting of the rural Indians’s social and material poverty is a pointed challenge to unidimensional readings of rural peasant consciousness as only embodying the loss and aporia typically associated with kala pani passage. In No Pain, the peasants’s sense of community is

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very much grounded by forms of cultural creolization that are unequivocally the product of their efforts to belong in the Ca­rib­bean. In this re­spect, No Pain precedes the kind of ideological shift acclaimed Indo-­Guyanese poet and writer David Dabydeen advocates for in his path-­breaking collection Slave Song (1984):31 I would hope that what Slave Song does is to show how Indian the Creole is, not just in the use of Indian diction—­but also in the ­whole setting of cows, and ­houses on stilts, and savannahs and paddy-­fields. That agricultural experience is very Indian, and it is arrogant to [. . .] think that we can be on the land, day in and day out, since 1838, and not feel for that land and not belong to that land [. . .] We who cut cane and grow rice and get bitten by snakes, are the West Indians who inhabit the spirit of the land, certainly in Guyana.32

Far from suggesting a rehierarchization between the Indian experience of enslavement and alienation against the African, Dabydeen makes clear that unequal repre­sen­ta­tion has marked both literary production and exegesis, such that the “spirit” of certain persons, natu­ral landscapes, and ­labor relations are excluded from being and belonging, ­whether from the ­imagined pages of literary canons or in the ­imagined constructs of citizenship.

No Pain Like This Body Set over the course of a week during the monsoon season in August 1905, more than a de­cade before the formal termination of indentureship in 1917, the peasants of Karan Settlement, Tola Trace, in the fictional Carib Island, likely represent one of the many post-­indenture Indian communities that ­were settled in the countryside in exchange for return passage to India ­after the termination of their bondage. In this sense, the “Carib Indians” of No Pain represent ­those who settled to live on the temporary land of ­labor in lieu of repatriation and return to the land of birth. Narrated in a blended language mixing onomatopoeia, formal En­glish, and a colloquial Bhojpuri Creole, No Pain is depicted in a childlike vocabulary that amplifies the perspective of siblings Balraj, Sunaree, and the twins Rama and Pandey. This a­ ngle is underscored by the omniscient use of Ma, Pa, Nanna (grand­father) and Nanny (grand­mother) to refer to the principal adult characters, as well as by the wonderment and awe of the c­ hildren who, like Hurston’s embattled child protagonists, feel constantly the panoptic “big big eyes” of the “sky God” who watches without ever seeming to come to their aid (16). The c­ hildren’s common exclamation that the “sky God” is nothing “but a lump of blackness . . . ​dead and rotten in the sky” (115), strengthens the reader’s empathetic realization that neither social nor spiritual intervention has ever come within their reach. Very early on, it is established that the ­children’s sage-­like agnosticism about god’s existence, or, rather, their acquiescence t­ owards the absence of divine aid, comes from a harsh upbringing in vio­lence, abuse, and

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desolation. The novel begins with the ­children’s playful search for “crappo fish” (tadpoles) in the ­water, a scene repeated several times and an act that comes to be seen as the only time the c­ hildren do not participate in their adult duties, which include planting rice, cooking, cleaning the h ­ ouse, and fetching their grandparents when Pa’s drunken rages have driven them from the h ­ ouse. The slave-­like conditions imposed on the ­children are frequently voiced by the youn­gest sibling, five-­year-­old Panday, who constantly bemoans his youth and unsuitability for planting rice: Panday was afraid [of Pa] b ­ ecause some of the rice plants he had planted w ­ ere leaning in the ­water; ­others w ­ ere buried so deep into the mud that the tops ­were hidden ­under the muddy ­water; some of the plants just floated above the ­water. “Look wot you doin Panday!” Sunaree said. “I not doin notten. Dis rice could kiss me ass! I is a chile.” “If Pa hear you he go beat you Panday!” “But I is a l­ ittle chile!” (65)

On the pivotal night during which Rama, one of the twins, gets ill, the c­ hildren have been standing in the pouring rain all after­noon and into the eve­ning, barely clothed and without food, waiting for Pa to leave the h ­ ouse. Able to return only by nightfall, Balraj and Panday are feverish. Poisonous scorpions flooded out of the rice fields have invaded the rice box, the only semi-­dry space Ma can find to protect them from the rain, and they are both bitten. ­Later, this same rice box ­will be refashioned into Rama’s coffin ­because the ­family has no money left ­after funeral experiences to have a new one made. Nanna’s immediate actions to fight the poison betray his having become accustomed to a life in which superstition and pseudoscience must often serve as a substitute for real medical help. He first roasts a dead scorpion thinking that it w ­ ill act to c­ ounter the effects of the scorpion bite, next demanding that Balraj and Rama urinate in his palms so that he can use it as a medicinal balm, ­until fi­nally concocting a ­bitter tea made out of “scorpion bush” leaves. All the while, Nanna recites scripture, begging the sky god to heal his grandchildren. The c­ hildren worsen, and Rama loses consciousness. Frustrated by his refusal to take real action, Nanny and Ma force him to take the boys to the hospital for medical help. In Pa’s absence, Nanna has to arrange for a ­horse cart to take the boys to the hospital in Tolaville which lies across the Tola river. Since the rains have washed away the single bamboo bridge connecting them to the world outside, Nanna has to carry the boys on his shoulders over the ­waters. As the ­women and young girl watch, Nanna’s figure achieves epic proportions in their eyes, transformed into a “­great beast reaching up to the sky” (50). As he carefully navigates the crossing, they sense that “time grew long; long like a rope, and tied them like a rope too [and] the g­ reat beast danced to the tune of death between the darkness and the void. The beast

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danced even though it knew it was ­going to die . . . ​it danced and danced, till the void and the darkness strangled the beast” (50). The narrative ­here, as elsewhere, switches seamlessly into the language of magical realism to depict Nanna’s navigation of the river in terms of passage itself, where the experience of crossing is as if “time” stretches like a “rope” that entangles the ancestral with the young and new. But, as grand­father carries grand­son in a b ­ attle against death, thunder that has continuously shattered across the sky ­going “doom doom doomed” (10) has perhaps all along prepared us for Rama’s death from pneumatic fever in fewer than three days. The novel’s prelude consists of an abbreviated description (in four lines) of the island’s history—­from Columbus’s “discovery” through to British occupation, the island’s chief exports, and its history of Indian indentureship (saying nothing of African slavery though references are made to “Creole” characters in the novel). Adjacent to this is a detailed hand-­drawn map of Tola District, including a legend, that provides an aerial view of the diversity of Tola Trace’s terrain, its vegetation, estate and road names, rivers and settlements, and location on the coast of the Gulf of Tola. That all the estate names point to indenture, e.g., “Indian Estate,” “Coolie Trace Estate,” and “Bound Coolie Estate,” highlights its historical importance to the island. The topographical diversity  first introduced by this map showcases the geopo­liti­cal hybridity of the terrain—­old but functioning sugar plantations abutting the newer terrain of rice fields. More than an intimate gesture by which the author draws a reader firmly into the world of the text, the hand-­drawn quality of the cartography adds another layer in Ladoo’s suggestion that no official map yet exists to capture wholly Indian spaces visibly isolated and separated from outer real­ity, so it is the utter isolation of Tola’s inhabitants from modern society and other racial groups that is first made graphically clear. Strategically, moreover, the map’s placement as the first “text” introduces the residual traces of colonialism via the land’s divisions into estates and rice fields, while si­mul­ta­neously underscoring the density of Asian transplants to the Caribbean—­sugar fields, rice paddies, and bamboo grasses. The map’s depiction of the pervasive presence of Asian terrains now organic to the Ca­rib­bean countryside furthermore amplifies the novel’s linking of the land and its changing landscapes to constructs of rural Indian belonging. Importantly, Ladoo’s characterization of Ma’s own strength through adversity captures the constrained and fraught contexts in which the rural (post) indenture w ­ oman must navigate her own agency and place. It is through Ma’s multilayered ­battles, against husband, society, and at times even the natu­ral ele­ ments, that Ladoo provides both a win­dow into a hitherto unexamined community and critique of its closed-­minded cultural misogyny. As a minority created by the indenture system’s “one third quota” rule, w ­ omen’s histories ­were perceived and framed by two dominant classes, colonial masters and Indian

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patriarchy. Conventionally, w ­ hether one looks to Ca­rib­bean or Indo-­Caribbean lit­er­a­ture, the peasant Indian w ­ oman is rarely allowed an internal subjectivity and seldom presented as protagonist, thus making her the emblematic “Other of Girmit ideology.”33 However, the fact that indenture both targeted and appealed to so-­called outcast ­women, such as professional entertainers, ­w idows, or runaways, makes it impossible to recast their history within a binarism about ­either personal benefit or victimization. As Pirbhai has argued, “­women both enjoyed and suffered” from the quota, and the first wave of ­women “­were not ready to surrender their autonomy, resisting the creation [or] reproduction of the patriarchal nuclear f­ amily in the diaspora.”34 Much like Bhabha’s resistant “Third Space,” as Lomarsh Roopnarine argues, indenture w ­ omen occupy “a m ­ iddle ground [. . .] between Eu­ro­pean imperialist patriarchy at the top and East Indian patriarchy at the bottom” that was one of “agency and intervention, and where cultural meaning was located as well as constructed. It was also a place where Indian indentured ­women created a sense of identity [not as] anything new or anything original [but] where culture—­especially suppressed cultural characteristics—­was expressed.35 In most Ca­rib­bean fiction, as I ­w ill discuss in more detail in Chapter 4, the (post)indenture Indian ­woman has not been portrayed in keeping with her ancestral ties with indentured ­women and their efforts at cultural re­sis­tance and reinvention. According to Ramabai Espinet, the earliest and most successful Indo-­Caribbean writers such as V. S. Naipaul, Samuel Selvon, and Neil Bissoondath helped perpetuate the ste­reo­t ype of the “proper,” “docile,” or “domesticated” Indian w ­ oman—an image that has obfuscated the strug­gles endured and made by Indian ­women during and since coming to the Ca­rib­bean as laborers.36 No Pain not only returns us to the impor­tant historical place of w ­ omen’s work but is also careful not to romanticize the risks undertaken by w ­ omen when negotiations of their rights necessitate self-­sacrifice. As mentioned, the desperate actions of Ma fall within the problematic history of indenture’s gendered quota system, in which w ­ omen’s re­sis­tance and autonomy are desired and articulated despite g­ reat risks to the self. Ma’s final acts, the eating of soil and flight into the wilderness, are most appropriately read, I suggest, as cathartic actions in keeping with Ca­rib­bean and anticolonial forms of gendered re­sis­tance. Her ingestion of soil from the rice field and subsequent vanis­hing into the forest translate as coded earth acts that recall, most specifically, the practice of geophagy (earth eating) among female slaves and marronage (runaway), both of which instantiate freedom’s importance to the enslaved beyond the risks that come with self-­harm or flight. Interpreting Ma’s actions within this rubric of gendered inscrutability, rather than as simply “mad” as Pa and ­others believe, underscores the constant thin line, and writerly risk, that Ladoo himself navigates by refusing to romanticize ­either the destitution or bravery of the rural condition. On the contrary, the novel’s ambivalent ending reinforces the literary void and/or

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vacuum surrounding both Indo-­Caribbean rural identity and the rural Indo-­ Caribbean w ­ oman, which this novel in large mea­sure remedies.

“Junglee Coolie” As with theories of creolization, which I have e­ arlier suggested make vis­i­ble certain species of hybridization by obscuring ­others, literary configurations of the sensibility of the Ca­rib­bean peasant ­were idealistic romanticizations spearheaded by mostly middle-­class male writers. Viewing the “peasant,” as articulated in ­t hese de­cades, as idea and ideal is critically informative to understanding the double consciousness at work in the Ca­rib­bean literary legacy that Ladoo expands on to include the rural Indian peasant. Importantly, precisely b ­ ecause of indenture’s colonialist framing as temporary work, indenture experience has seldom been studied within its own diasporic continuum on plantations and estates, and rarely do we find literary repre­sen­ta­tions of peasant identity and community that imagine rural Indians as living transplants continuing to adapt and accommodate post-­passage. The rural Indian presence has typically been studied from ­either a sociohistorical or anthropological framework that posits rural Indian populations as anachronistic, culturally backward, fossilized, or anti-­creolization, and thus, by extension, outside of and exterior to the spaces and concerns of the real (read urban and diasporic) Ca­rib­bean. Indeed, if rural Indian peasant laborers ­were the pejorative “coolie” to missionaries and colonials, in the more recent postcolonial context in which No Pain is published, Indians who remained in the rural hinterlands ­were often derogatively referred to as “junglee coolies.” “Junglee”37—­connoting an uncouth or unrefined person—­marked the rural peasant’s otherness from urbanizing Indo-­Caribbeans and also served as a collective label that projected the outlier position of rural Indians viewed as incapable of or resistant to the cultural reinvention and/or modern pro­gress enjoyed by the mainstream and majority. “Junglee coolie” is in this context a neocolonizing adage that frames rural Indian cultural identities and practices as antithetical to creolizing pro­cesses configured in mostly urban terms. This negative repre­sen­ta­tion of rural Indian peasants occurs in large part due to a proliferation of Ca­r ib­bean and Indo-­ Caribbean lit­er­a­ture focused on metropolitan and cosmopolitan issues and is also a result of the absence of rural indenture culture in what Mahabir and Pirbhai have identified as a “tradition of under-­representation and misrepre­sen­ta­ tion in the development of Ca­rib­bean literary studies.”38 While Indian characters have appeared regularly throughout the Ca­rib­bean literary tradition since the nineteenth c­ entury, indenture persons and the inner world of Indians w ­ ere conventionally filtered through the actions and perspective of non-­Indian characters.39 As Clem Seecharan points out, the pejorative weight of the colonial term “coolie,” a word commonly used to personify rural Indian identity, positions

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Indians in a double bind, particularly so for agrarian Indians working on post-­ slavery sugar estates. “[U]nsavoury associations” of the “coolie’s servitude, ignorance, heathenism and barbarism” from the colonial context lingered as a “stain on real pro­gress and visions of expanding possibilities.” 40 L ­ ater in the twentieth ­century, the growing presence of “respectable” citified, professional Indians further offsets the social undesirability of Indian laborers. Seecharan goes on to note that l­ ittle ideological or meta­phorical room was available for rural Indians to reinvest “coolie” identity through their own actions: pro­g ress with rice, ­cattle, and vari­ous small businesses [as efforts] to move beyond the stigma attached to the word “coolie” through hard work reflected in unremitting, arduous work in the fields, c­ attle pastures, sugar estates, and provision and dry goods shops [was] interpreted as evidence of their greed and meanness [. . .] Recognition did not come easily in this world of snobbery and stubborn hierarchies.41

Countless cultural anthropological studies, as mentioned in the Introduction to this book, have claimed a fundamental irreconcilability between Africans and Indians and thus the unfeasibility of intercultural sharing in the Ca­rib­bean. As one early example of studies in this vein, Barton Schwartz’s work, conducted in remote Indian villages of Trinidad in the 1960s, offers vari­ous examples that demonstrate the strong presence of “non-­Hindu cultural influences” among rural populations resulting in a significant alteration of traditional Hinduism through an integration of Creole influences.42 Notwithstanding ­these examples of vibrant cultural mixing and fluidity, Schwartz concludes that this “reflects a transitional society desirous of moving only in the direction of increased economic and po­liti­cal opportunities.” 43 The implication h ­ ere is that despite instances in which it may appear that rural Indians exhibit their own manner of intercultural integration as a product of their efforts to belong, ­t hese are more readily interpreted as empty per­for­mances enacted purely for economic self-­advancement in spite of the fact that the evidence points to very real cultural shifts in spiritual beliefs. In Lee-­L oy’s literary study, Searching for Mr. Chin,44 a comparable case is made for repre­sen­ta­tions of Chinese persons in Ca­rib­bean fiction. As she notes, the ste­reo­type of the “Chinese shop­keeper,” while serving as an instance in which Chineseness is given one manner of presence in the Ca­rib­bean literary imaginary, depicted “financially stable and/or generous parental figures” ensconced in a state of endless “good times [. . .] The average West Indian remain[ed] trapped in a space of servitude while the Chinese [had] an entirely dif­fer­ent experience of mobility, most obviously demonstrated when their money allows them to flee the country when times get tough.” 45 On the one hand, colonial narratives used the discourse of financial wealth and thrift to portray the purported greed of Chinese business ­people thought to be driving out native West Indians, thus subliminally suggesting the non-­native status of Chinese Ca­rib­be­ans. On the

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other, even post-­colonial lit­er­a­ture from the West Indies continued to depict the “Chinese as outsiders preying on native West Indian self-­sufficiency, advancement, and interests [. . .] as parasites fattening their own bank accounts off the misery of other West Indians, reinforcing the idea that while threats in the land, they are not “real” West Indians.” 46 In No Pain, Ladoo reframes the wildness of the “junglee coolie” as a cultural density that evolves wholly outside of urban and metropolitan spaces and characterizes the peasants’s own manner of habitation as “real” Ca­rib­be­ans. Cultural evolution in the novel is furthermore characterized as a pro­cess that includes both perversion (e.g., of caste) and the transposition of Indian expressive culture through folk instruments, song, and dance. In one emblematic scene, as lightning and thunder resound across the night sky, the f­ amily’s meagre clay ­house is transformed into a sacred space through the characters’ devotional singing, dancing, and musicality. In what appears to be a daily ritual by which the travails of the outside world are momentarily transcended, Ma sings verses in Hindi while her d ­ aughter Sunaree begins playing the flute to accompany Nanny’s rhythmic beating of the dholak (Indian percussive drum). Three generations of w ­ omen join in concert with the rain to produce a ­music “sweeter than sugar; than life even”—­Nanny’s deft hands touch “the goat’s skin as [long] accustomed to it,” Sunaree’s agile fin­gers embracing the holes in the “bamboo flute as if they ­were made for them,” with Ma dancing (33). The kitchen is filled with “­music and sadness; ­music from the sky and the earth . . . ​sadness from the earth alone,” but the w ­ omen’s “spirits w ­ ere growing and floating in the air like silkcotton flowers” (33). Isolation and poverty are recast as critical aspects of a thriving and inventive humanity not typically associated with this group. Specifically, Ladoo’s inclusion of the language, musicality, and spirituality of rural communities redirects the conventionally negative stereotyping of this group as culturally static or anachronistic, views that, I argue, fall back on so­cio­log­i­cal and anthropological studies of the group that misinterpret and obscure forms of cultural adaptation and innovation which in fact belong within creolization’s rubric of cultural pollination and transplantation. By the 1970s, when No Pain was published, Indo-­Caribbean rural life and identity had been pop­u­lar­ized in par­tic­u­lar through the internationally renowned works of other (primarily male, Trinidadian) Indo-­Caribbean writers. Samuel Selvon and V. S. Naipaul, two Indo-­Caribbean writers most commonly known both regionally and abroad and whose works are regularly anthologized in comprehensive studies even t­ oday, focused quite exclusively on the urbanization of (Hindu) Indo-­Trinidadians, a modernizing Trinidad, and the diasporic expansion of the Ca­rib­bean in the West. Widely read works such as A Brighter Sun (1952) and A House for Mr. Biswas (1961), for instance, validated the agrarian roots of Indian presence in the region while showcasing the community’s cultural assimilation and acculturation with a Creole social order. Selvon’s generally opti-

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mistic portraits of the Africanization of Indianness ­were, of course, better received than Naipaul’s more pessimistic ruminations on the difficult entry of Indians into the social mainstream, emblematized by the chronic ­house­lessness Mr. Biswas inadvertently imposes on his f­amily a­ fter leaving the Tulsi homestead in the country. Though diametrically opposed in vision and outlook, the literary worlds of Selvon and Naipaul do convene in their favored attention to the gradual urbanization of hapless but ambitious rural Indians on the path to self-­invention as they come to terms with adapting to a world outside of the agrarian regions of their forebears in the Ca­rib­bean. Published in 1952, Samuel Selvon’s A Brighter Sun and his endearing creation, Tiger, for instance, are regarded as the “exemplary climax” of West Indian lit­er­ a­ture precisely for being so thoroughly new in the Ca­rib­bean literary landscape.47 The novel begins with a provocative introduction to the protagonist that juxtaposes his wedding with the global upheavals brought on by World War II, emphasizing interconnections between rural Trinidad and the urban outer regions, regardless of their geo­graph­i­cal remove. In as much as colonies become emboldened by empire’s evident vulnerabilities during war, Tiger’s own horizons expand in tandem, and the backdrop of colonial emancipation sets the mood for his ambitions—­e.g., to learn “proper” En­glish, win ­favor with American soldiers, engineer his village’s first tar road, get an education, and perhaps even go to ­England. Throughout the novel, change and flux punctuate Selvon’s repre­sen­ ta­tion of rural Chaguanas as a transcultural melting pot, most emphatically presented in the character of Tiger himself, who appears to know nothing about how to be or act Indian, least of all at his own marriage to a teenage girl selected for him by his ­family. As Tiger responds when constantly called out for not knowing Indian customs, “I never grow up in too much Indian custom. All dif­fer­ent kinds of p ­ eople in Trinidad, you have to mix up with all of them.” 48 Interestingly, ­here, Tiger’s rural roots are couched in the language of metropolitan multiculturalism and his own diminishing (rural) Indianness shown to be easily cast off trappings as he chases his dreams of becoming a “big shot” capable of “forgetting the habits and customs of his own ­people.” 49 Similarly, in V. S. Naipaul’s Miguel Street (1959), the anonymous rural Hindu lad, who had never before ridden a bus, seen or smelt the sea, or encountered street signs u ­ ntil moving to Port of Spain, learns from and outgrows Miguel Street, a sociocultural microcosm of urban Trinidad. Though we are asked to see him as a “dancing dwarf ” as he makes his way to the plane bound for ­England, the imperative to leave has all along been underscored in the stories’ suggestion that he has fully freed himself from his rural roots and now even Trinidad itself. Beyond the humanizing effect t­ hese new and path-­breaking canonized fictions had on prior colonialist repre­sen­ta­tions of rural Indians, the tragi-­comic voice characteristic in ­t hese works helped deflate and detract from the authors’ pre­sen­ta­tion of the difficult assimilation of this group. The pre­sen­ta­tion of Indian

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creolization as an inevitably urbanizing phenomenon, moreover, underscored Indian rurality as an anomalous anachronism in a post-­independence period concerned with nation-­building, emergent diasporic communities, and cosmopolitan cultural hybridization. While clearly filled with obstacles, both physical and psychological, urbanization was presented not merely as a possibility but a necessity for individual success. The configuration of rural Indian culture as nonthreatening, rescuable, and even curable within local urbanscapes or global metropolises presented rural Indian cultural identity, such as is explored in Ladoo’s oeuvre, as a ­t hing of the past. Indeed, Ladoo’s portrayal of both peasant isolation and isolationism as historically constructed legacies overtly conflicts with the cosmopolitanism and horizon-­expanding visions of identity and community pop­u­lar­ized in such fictions of Indian rurality. On the one hand, the implied subtext that rural Indian spaces and identities lacked and needed already-­existing modes of living acquired by t­ hose in the outer urban realm foregrounded the metropolitan and modern achievements patently absent in a community cut off from the most basic of modern necessities. On the other, however, the fact that the protagonists (all male and Hindu) in the abovementioned novels are able to overcome and even excel within the narrow par­ameters of their given real­ity, with dutiful and doting m ­ others and wives enabling them all the way, symbolically infers the sociocultural backwardness and stagnancy of peasant Indians who become, inadvertently or not, cast in the very image of the colonial “coolie.” This binarism, that is, “coolie” as rural and backward and “Creole” as urban and uplifting, is accompanied by a gender division which pre­sents the Indian male as aspiring innovator against the Indian female who is ingenuous, passively entrenched within traditions, and needing constant guidance when it comes to social be­hav­ior. In a classic example from Mystic Masseur (1957), the aspiring writer Ganesh Ramsumair is matched with a young ­woman who, according to her ­father, is a masterful sign painter. Though her final products are nonsensical (i.e., misspellings coupled with misplaced punctuation) Ramsumair is enchanted by this nascent sign of her ability to “write,” in some sense of the word, as it is his own ambition to become a writer. As Kenneth Ramchand points out, a closer reading of peasant works written by writers abroad in the 1950s and 60s reveals several paradoxes. For one, lengthy descriptions of what would have been easily familiar to the Ca­rib­bean reader betray a writer’s pressure to make sense to a British audience.50 Additionally, despite the clear strains of despair, anguish, and anxiety undergirding the texts, they ­were read and received primarily against a “happy rubric” so as to bring focus on anything positive “in the anticipation of in­de­pen­dence.”51 Thus, titles such as A Brighter Sun (Samuel Selvon, 1952), New Day (V. S Reid, 1949), or In a Green Night (Derek Walcott, 1962) signaled a new climate of optimism (despite the works’ depiction of greater complexity) in which the greater “pessimism” of Edward K. Brathwaite and Naipaul ­were viewed as “betrayal or misplaced.”52 In

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the early de­cades of the twentieth ­century, changes in Britain’s imperial interests, the end of World War I, and the ­Great Depression greatly contributed to a climate of growing national consciousness in Ca­r ib­bean literary production. Specifically, the impetus was to create “au­t hen­tic national lit­er­a­tures based on working-­class and peasant culture” among writers e­ ither living in the Ca­rib­bean or returning home from abroad.53 More complicatedly, the use of a peasant figure to represent the new, postcolonial nationhood of Ca­rib­bean subjects in the 1950s and ’60s was not unproblematic given that certain class and gender privileges pervaded in the writings of this period.54 As Edward K. Brathwaite notes, despite the fact that more than one hundred novels ­were published between 1950 and ’65 alone, a deep schism had formed between “our expatriate artistic selves” and the “local existential real­ity.”55 Thus, even visionary proj­ects such as Negritude and the West Indies Federation w ­ ere short-­lived precisely ­because they ­were the ideologies born through the writings of writers abroad, both “too metropolitan a product and reaction to bear effective praxis in the islands.”56 Cheddi Jagan’s “Marxist/native . . . ​Afro/Asian” movement was crushed; in 1962 the Federation was disbanded—[Eric] Williams’ long-­promised Massa Day was not done.” Brathwaite instead invokes Sylvia Wynter’s critically path-­breaking essay “Reflections on West Indian Writing and Criticism” (1968/69) to argue for the importance of “failure” in a locally or regionally produced West Indian aesthetics. “Failure” would accentuate a native and folk personality that did not require inspiration out of metropolitan exile or the assumption that native p ­ eople needed to grow and develop through an edification of colonial culture. It was ­after all, Brathwaite asserts, out of the “mud of deprivation” that Caliban forced Prospero into dialogue through a “defense/attack” that produced an “interculturation of ­Great and L ­ ittle traditions.” Such are the roots of “culture,” i.e., unexpected, unconventional, and dialogic, born out of the Ca­rib­bean soil and that could have meaning in the Ca­rib­be­an.57 In Ca­r ib­bean lit­er­a­ture, what indeed has been the impact of an ­i magined Ca­rib­bean “peasant” that projected the nostalgia and anxiety of a specific group of writers abroad? We can take as exemplary the oft-­quoted lines from Lamming’s rumination of exile as a “plea­sure” and “paradox” that enabled writers (such as himself) to “get out” of the native country even while “hunger[ing] for nourishment from the soil [. . .] an acre of ground in the New World which keeps growing echoes in my head.”58 According to Lamming, the West Indian writer, despite his privileges of education, had always to look in and down at what had traditionally been ignored. For the first time the West Indian peasant became other than a cheap source of ­labour. He became, through the novelist’s eye, a living existence, living in silence and joy and fear, involved in riot and carnival. It is the West Indian novel that has restored the West Indian peasant to his true and original status of personality.59

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Lamming ­here asserts a metaphysical affiliation between the exiled West Indian writer and the peasant, conjoining artistic ­labor with manual work in the suggestion that the poet digs within and “down” primarily as a way to pay homage to the once-­stigmatized Ca­rib­bean laborer who could now serve as a collective signifier ­toward a new regional consciousness. According to Selwyn Cudjoe, the use of landscape, nature, and social realism in new fiction of the early to mid-­ twentieth c­ entury replaced the language of psy­chol­ogy used in the e­ arlier ­century. The aestheticization of the peasant and peasant life in par­tic­u ­lar was viewed as the critical first step in this intellectual pro­cess, which sought new ave­nues with which to voice subjective experiences previously not encountered on the literary page and to fashion t­ hese as a kind of new decolonial awakening. Significantly, A.R.F. Webber, whom Cudjoe identifies as “a nationalist” and “first novelist of Trinidad and Tobago . . . ​lost to the pages of West Indian literary and cultural history,” 60 was the first to give indenture a literary presence in ­Those That Be in Bondage: A Tale of Indian Indenture and Sunlit Western W ­ aters (1917), even though the work’s larger aim is to stress the continuing exploitative practices of the plantocracy and does so by privileging the perspective of the planter classes. The construct of the peasant as a product of modernity-­in-­rurality in Ca­rib­ bean fiction has also depended on very specific repre­sen­ta­tions of the site of the plantation and its impact on the psy­chol­ogy and sensibility of all island inhabitants.61 The association of this landscape with an anticolonial paradigm of modernity has issued particularly from a certain interpretation of the technology of sugar production in the region. Whereas Ca­rib­bean “paddy leaves” 62 continue to associate the Asian rice field with the rural backwardness of Indian peasants, the so-­called “junglee coolies,” the site of the plantation is often credited as being the birthing site of a cultural modernity foundational to the enslaved’s beginning efforts at re­sis­tance and as the foundational space of radical intercultural creolization practices between arrivants in their new worlds. This is a central point in C.L.R. James’s idea of Ca­rib­bean society’s peculiar new worldness: You are a strange, unique combination of the greatest driving force in the world t­ oday, the underdeveloped formerly colonial coloured p ­ eoples; and more than any of them, by education, way of life and language, you are completely a part of Western civilization. 63

James’s view of the Ca­rib­bean as inherently modern and “Western” is premised on the idea that island plantations existed as large open-­air factories requiring the period’s most efficient technological equipment for the production of sugar. The paradoxical ramifications of plantation technology, however, as James makes clear, rests in the fact that plantocracy’s abuse of h ­ uman rights infected both colony and metropole, and this ultimately revealed the fault lines in Eu­ro­pean self-­proclamations about the superiority of Western civilized society. On the one hand, according to James, plantations emblematized the West’s mission of pro­

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gress now cast on a global scale through a sophisticated coordination of differently skilled persons and myriad new inventions. On the other, however, the plantocracy could not function without the self-­sacrificing contributions of the same h ­ umans being systematically trafficked and exploited in the ser­v ice of empire’s insatiable appetites. The coincidental repercussions of cultivating, distributing, and consuming sugar thus not only exposed empire’s de­pen­dency on the colonies, but, more powerfully, proved the essential, and not accidental, status of sugar producers (i.e., slaves) as indelibly “a part,” and not simply product, of Western civilization. The site of the plantation is also often studied as a repository of sorts from which cultural historians maintain the radical, transcultural initiatives between dif­fer­ent enslaved African groups meeting in this original contact zone a­ fter passage.64 Bridget Breton, for instance, convincingly argues against viewing slavery as a complete “social death” (apropos Orlando Patterson) in her study of small acts of re­sis­tance, which she terms as petit marronage. In “day-­to-­day actions” such as “food habits, sartorial choice, religion, and ­family life,” she argues, the enslaved ­were far more “insidious and more undermining of the system” than acts of outright rebellion.65 In her view, despite slavery’s panoptic control of slaves’ lives, t­ here ­were “many trajectories of freedom: many ways of struggling for it, many routes to self-­assertion and community building [. . .] central to their non-­stop strug­gles for a degree of control over the conditions of their existence, and they constituted the core of their lives a­ fter the end of slavery.” 66 Similarly, Simon Gikandi provides for a way to read slavery as a “culture of taste” constituted “out of the ruins of Africanism [from which] slaves could have a vision of their location and dislocation in both the new and old worlds.” 67 For slaves, “culture had to start as a ruin” in that it issued from the trauma of transplantation and passage. The cultivated tastes produced out of t­ hese “rupturings survived and thrived precisely b ­ ecause of their difference from enlightenment aesthetics.” 68 As his research in the archives evidenced, “the colonial government missed the ontological and aesthetic function of the provision ground and its emergence as an essential feature of the enslaved Africans’ proj­ ect of redefining their own spaces of bondage [i.e., the plantation barracks].” 69 Knowing the risks of ruin by storms, slaves chose to cultivate above­ground crops, such as corn and fruit trees as opposed to ground provisions like cassava and potato, so as to transform the “provision ground [into] an aesthetic space that transcended the landscape of slavery [and] the ontology of enslavement.”70 In the abovementioned examples, it is noteworthy that signs of ambivalence and/ or disjuncture are reread as inventive maneuvering by the enslaved. Specifically, actions on plantations deemed as uncivilized or threatening according to colonial and enlightenment cultural standards that exalted rationality, perfection, unity, and harmony have been rightly translated in postcolonial discourse as strategic reconfigurations on the part of the colonized, and thus readable as

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evidence of a thriving ingenuity among resilient ­human beings exploited and terrorized in e­ very other aspect of their lives on the plantation. Critical importance is given to the discordant and incomprehensible nature of coded and symbolic acts of cultural re­sis­tance and innovation among the enslaved. Ladoo’s rural world serves as counterpart, and not antithesis, to such imaginings of Ca­rib­be­anist innovation and re­sis­tance, and No Pain responds to both the occlusion of rural Indians from configurations of the peasant and misrepre­ sen­ta­tions of indenture’s legacy of continuing cultural evolution in the Ca­rib­ bean countryside. Characteristically Ca­rib­bean traits of creativity and re­sis­tance play a significant role in Ladoo’s attempt to treat the rice field as its own literary trope within an indenture poetics of cultural reinvention. Ladoo transposes the themes of claustrophobia and innovation associated with the trope of the plantation to foreground forms of cultural creolization occurring within the culturescapes of Asian rice fields and sugar estates. Ladoo’s estate Indians are thus not merely fossils of a tradition preserved intact, as is typically assumed of this group, but are marked by a climate of productive cultural flux and synthesis. As we see in several scenes attending to ritual and religious mores, Hinduism itself is rendered meaningful only insofar as it connects to the villa­gers’ creolized beliefs, including invocations of the “Aryan gods” from the “Hindu Bible” (i.e., the Puranas and the Ramayana epic) that merge seamlessly with the villa­gers’ equally fervent beliefs in lagahurs (human-­turned-­animal servants of the devil), jumbies, jables (child-­abducting witches), and duennes (malevolent spirits). The novel’s glossary helps to foreground such cultural creolizations. Explanations of Hindi terms and objects, such as “arti” (oil lamp), “bhajan” (Hindu hymn), “chamar” (lowest of the four Hindu castes), and “lota” (brass cup), sit on the same page as detailed descriptions of “Creole” superstitions embraced by the villa­gers, such as “duennes” (of African origin, referring to spirits of unborn ­children), “lagahus” (from the French loup garou, a person who receives money from the devil in exchange for their ser­v ice), and “jumbies” (spirits).

New World Indianness Ladoo’s No Pain expands on the literary landscape and construct of the Ca­rib­ bean peasant by including the exile and alienation of rural Indo-­Caribbeans who have no opportunity to “get out” (in Lamming’s sense) of their dire predicament, but the novel can also be read against the contemporaneous po­liti­cal context of the 1970s (when Ladoo was writing) during which increased racial riots forced almost one-­t hird of the Indo-­Caribbean population to “get out.” Thus Carib Island, as parable to Ladoo’s contemporaneous Trinidad, can be seen to figuratively capture the origin of what Frank Birbalsingh identifies as the “second forced exodus” of Indo-­Caribbeans to North Amer­i­ca,71 giving rise to what Lokaisingh-­Meighoo has called the “doubly diasporic” nature of Indo-­Caribbean

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belonging within an extended kala pani space linking the Ca­rib­bean to its global north.72 This cross-­spectrum of exile merges rural and global realities in the indenture and post-­indenture contexts, offering a provocative paradigm in which the continuation of diasporic migration in the Indo-­Caribbean context can be viewed from a non-­cosmopolitanist perspective that is, moreover, understood as a product and extension of kala pani’s legacy of double exclusion now extended onto the newly emerging post-­indenture diasporic spaces of North Amer­i­ca. In this way, Ladoo outlines an indenture continuum that resituates the Ca­rib­bean (and not India) as the new center of an emergent Indo-­Caribbean diasporic sensibility and consciousness. The provocative name of Ladoo’s fictional island, Carib Island, is one of the clearest signs of the importance of “new world” places in the text’s repre­sen­ta­ tion of Indian belongingness post passage. In choosing the name of an Indigenous group thought to be the original inhabitants of a region named ­after them (i.e., Ca­r ib­bean from “Carib”),73 and one Indigenous population nearly decimated in the years of Eu­ro­pean imperialism, Ladoo quite deliberately introduces a central tension in Ca­rib­bean discourse—­the implied politics in constructs of native identity for a non-­Indigenous population. Ladoo’s symbolic invocation of the Indigenous to frame his literary proj­ect on the native status of post-­ indenture Indians may indeed fall into the quagmire Carlos Alonso identifies in the relationship between ideologies of hybridity and constructs of belongingness in the Amer­i­cas. In his hugely influential study, The Spanish American Regional Novel: Modernity and Autochthony (1990), Alonso studies the theme of autochthony (meaning “sprung from the soil”) and its influence on key authors in a genre he terms novelas de la tierra (novels of the land), who aspired to, or ­were at least inspired by, José Marti’s call for “a return to essence” in the latter’s foundational essay on postcolonial liberation, “Nuestra Amer­i­ca” (“Our Amer­ i­ca” 1887).74 Despite this seemingly anticolonial imperative, Alonso claims, the writers’ utilization of symbolic autochthony functioned as an empty and artificial ideology that characterized Latin American “culture” along neo-­imperialist lines by “making space for one culture desirous of defining itself at the expense of another.” According to Alonso’s line of argument, such literary expositions on a relationship between identity and “nature” projected an exoticization of the land and a cultural essentialization of Indigenous and, in general, rural populations. On the one hand, “writers of the land,” as he calls the mestizaje (a mix of Spanish and Indigenous) authors of this period, incorporate the terrain and ecol­ ogy of South Amer­i­ca—­rain forest, jungle, ranch lands, etc.—­with the intent to forge ties between the land of the continent and their belongingness to it. Yet, the methodology of their approach makes evident the authors’ ulterior motive to proj­ect a version of mestizaje identity that sought primarily to delineate fundamental differences between themselves and (pre)colonial Spain, and other imperial powers at the time, thus in fact exposing their real difference from

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non-­mestizo Indigenous inhabitants and the latter’s relationship to the land. As Alonso asks, what are the stakes in portrayals of la tierra, “the land,” and Indigenous ­people if ­t hese operate as ideological properties in the po­liti­cal agenda of a neocolonizing group? Similarly, in the Ca­rib­bean context, Indigenous p ­ eoples’ relationship to the land (both past and pre­sent) is seldom appreciated as critical to ­matters of the ­here and now, and their stakes in con­temporary politics and policies affecting the land are rarely represented. In Guyana more so than in Trinidad, though all con­temporary inhabitants have deep ties to the land that are rooted in a long history of conquest and cap­i­tal­ist ­labor, “claims to sovereignty” by the majority Afro-­and Indo-­Guyanese are established “while si­multa­neously denying the indigenous inhabitants their land rights and very identities”75 ­Because, in addition, Ladoo attends only to the lives and characters of one post-­indenture Indian community, Carib island’s narrow focus is perhaps problematic in that it becomes imbricated in what Shona Jackson identifies as the “constant displacement of Indigenous P ­ eoples” by “subaltern settler groups” who ­today control a “new understanding of indigeneity that [supports] modern belonging and the institution of themselves as new natives.”76 Importantly, however, No Pain does not attempt to “indigenize” its Indo-­Caribbean characters nor to pre­sent them as autochonous, thus Indigenous, to Carib Island. Instead, the novel explic­itly addresses a colonialist legacy of erasure and does so from a strictly indenture perspective. By highlighting ruralscapes that are utterly and almost completely Indian, Ladoo foregrounds the sites in which Indian communities have searched for and created narratives of deep belonging, experiences that are habitually rendered “invisible” (Lamming) and a kinship to the “spirit of the land” (Dabydeen) that has conventionally been denied. By naming his fictional Ca­rib­bean “Carib Island,” Ladoo perhaps asks us to consider why “new world” forms of cultural transplantation and reinvention enacted by some, such as his rural Indian peasants, are therefore viewed as apart and disconnected from the pro­cesses by which other non-­Indigenous groups have been seen to (successfully) negotiate their identities as new world citizens. In No Pain, relations to the land come precisely out of the social isolation and remoteness of Karan Settlement. Its remove from Tolaville, presumably Tola District’s main modern town, is magnified by a river traversable only by a tenuous bamboo bridge that serves as its only connection to the outside world. Panday’s elder ­brother, Balraj, describes his own encounter with this outer real­ity and the shock of “creole” workers upon seeing him at the Tolaville hospital where he and Rama are taken for medical help: “Dat night wen Nanna carry me and Rama in dat hospital was de fust time I see dat hospital. Wen we reach de haspital de creole wardman say, ‘Me God! Look at de state of dese coolie chirens!’ ” (110). In this scene, “coolie” and “creole” operate as words of recognition between the nurse and Balraj that underscore the young boys’ poverty as an absolute otherness, whereas the “creole” world recalls modernity through its association with

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Tolaville town, the hospital, and professional expertise. Physical claustrophobia, however, even as it highlights the villa­gers’ material impoverishment and vulnerability, heightens the community’s fervent articulations of their belongingness in terms of place. Ladoo’s characters often voice their pride as rural residents of Tola who, unlike their citified b ­ rothers and s­ isters, have not lost their way. As one unnamed character exclaims, “Dese young moderass ­people runnin away from Indian ways. But dey go sorry. In dis same Carib Island and Indians ­going to catch dey ass!” (70). Jadoo, the one-­legged carpenter who had once left to make money, expresses that his reasons for returning to Tola Trace are specific: “I come [back] to Tola b ­ ecause I want a son” (70). Similarly, Ma’s constant refrain to Pa when his wild rages threaten the lives of the c­ hildren is that her sole purpose is to ensure that “dese same chirens goin to come man and w ­ oman in dis same Tola” (33). “Karan settlement,” where Ma and her f­ amily reside, is so-­named a­ fter the man buried in the land and whose burial story serves as a legend about the historical ties of the Indian community in Tola. Karan, an indentured laborer, and John Sharp, a white overseer on Indian Estate, became such close friends that even a­ fter the end of his bondage in 1850, Karan followed Sharp to Tola and “lived at the white man’s ­house” (82). ­After Karan’s death, Sharp buried Karan in a tomb on the settlement. The narrative’s coupling of the ­children’s naïveté and vulnerability with the wisdom and strength of the grandparents lends No Pain a multigenerational framework that further consolidates its repre­sen­ta­t ion of indenture as a new world Indianness in which ancestral interpretations of kala pani passage as “void and darkness” are shown to have a productive afterlife and real­ity in the Ca­rib­ bean. As such, the novel insists on a diachronic context in which ancestral heritage is not lost or sacrificed post-­passage but continues to have a shaping role in Indian cultural continuity in new lands. The chaos and disruption of the ­children’s home, where t­ here is e­ ither the threat from the f­ ather or from the flooding that has made it easier for snakes and scorpions to enter from the fields, contrasts with the calm and order in the h ­ ouse of the grandparents, where Nanny sits e­ very night beating the dholak to guide Nanna’s return home in the dark, and where the ­children can go for hot food, dry and clean clothing, shelter, and cultural knowledge. Their role as leaders is most firmly established by their knowledgeable h ­ andling of the Hindu rituals surrounding Rama’s funeral. Pa’s refusal to assume any responsibility for his son’s death forces the grandparents into the primary role as caregivers, and it is they who pay for, or­ga­nize, and coordinate the funeral proceedings. While Nanna goes back and forth to Tolaville, first to fetch Rama’s body from the hospital and then to purchase the ingredients necessary for the religious rituals, Nanny moves between the kitchen and the h ­ ouse to feed the guests who have come as much for the plentiful rum and all-­night storytelling customary at such gatherings as to pay their re­spects. Against the backdrop of their frenetic efforts, Pa entices another ­woman to feed

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Ma enough rum to her keep incapacitated while he narrates (and grossly misrepresents) the cause leading to Rama’s death—­t he chief being, according to Pa, Ma’s negligence as a m ­ other b ­ ecause of her greater love for alcohol. At the wake, the full spectrum of the cultural transformations practiced by this community become evident. Referring to Hindu scriptures as the “Hindu Bible,” the priest emphasizes each prayer by making the sign of the cross while performing ritualistic Hindu practices such as w ­ ater sprinkling, offerings of flower and mango leaf garlands, diya lighting, and ghee ablutions, before overseeing the final act of burying (not a Hindu practice). Conversation among the villa­gers turns constantly to the issue of caste, in par­tic­u­lar the increasing ambivalence surrounding its meaning and significance. Every­one knows that the priest is not a “true” Brahmin but a pig minder and that the religious rituals they follow ­under his guidance are purely perfunctory, with the villa­gers themselves “putting on a show” (77). With a ­great deal of jumping “like a madman” and spitting “verses fast fast,” the priest stood by Rama’s head and recited some man­tras from the Puranas and Mahabharat. He recited as if quarrelling with God and quarrelling with the child; his voice sounded as if he was hungry or d ­ ying or something; his voice was heavy and it grated crat crat crat as if he had a cold; his breath was stinking so much that some of the villa­gers turned their f­ aces away; a long line of spit came out of his mouth as a fat whitish cord; and the flies went buzz buzz trying hard to get inside his dirty mouth. When he had heard his voice long enough, he ­stopped the recitation. (93)

As the priest rants on, the villa­gers “rubbed their bellies and cried and cried” (93) while at the same time pushing against each other in sexually suggestive ways. Indeed, the priest himself has a reputation for only “playin priest,” using his alleged higher social position to “­ride” ­women while pretending to exorcise spirits (73). He is often shouted down as a “chamar” (of lowest class), and his interpretations of rituals are constantly corrected by the crowd despite his remonstrations that as the only Brahmin he should be given sole privilege in their execution. The elders of the crowd, including Nana and Nanny, who we are told are “true” Brahmins, are shown no re­spect and treated as lowly servants. Ma’s utter difference from the closed-­minded cultural misogyny of her own community, suggested in her strategic removal from t­ hese scenes, is highlighted during the funeral, where she is unable to stand by herself or contradict Pa’s use of her drunken state as proof of her addiction as the cause for Rama’s death. Ladoo’s critique against the Hindu community becomes evident in ­t hese scenes brought out in the event of Rama’s death, similar to the disruption of social and po­liti­cal order initiated by the mythical Rama’s banishment from his kingdom in Ayodhya. The Ramayana depicts the exile of King Rama, and of his wife Sita and ­brother Lakshman who choose to accompany him, and the ­trials of their

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banishment (away from the center of power) which culminate in Sita’s abduction by Ravan, the raksha (demon) from the island of Ceylon (pre­sent day Sri Lanka) off the Indian mainland. A ­ fter her successful rescue, the exiled king is eventually reanointed as the ruler of Ayodhya. King Rama’s reintegration, however, cannot happen without subjugating Sita to a test, ag­ni puriksha (trial by fire), which is enforced with much reluctance on the part of the king who succumbs ­under peer pressure and social propriety and demands that Sita, as queen, must prove her chastity and loyalty to the king. In religious exegesis, Rama’s treatment of Sita has often been read as one of a series of flawed and misguided decisions the king falls prey to; indeed, t­ hese failures play an impor­tant role in humanizing the Rama figure precisely so as to make him relatable to the common person. Strikingly, the central ­women of both No Pain and Ramayana seek recourse from the earth as a response to judgement placed on them by their socie­ties without any real evidence. The mythical Sita is accused of misconduct by Rama only as an act to assuage his citizens’ need for assurances about her purity, and Ladoo’s Ma stands accused in the eyes of her community who choose to believe the authority of the ­father. Though Sita in some versions of the Ramayana returns with Rama to Ayodhya, Ma’s disappearance in the jungle bears more similarity with Sita’s actions in versions of the myth that, according to A. K. Ramanujan, instantiate the epic’s importance as interlocked stories about endless migration in which the main theme is of separation, and not of reunion or return that lies at “the heart of the Hindu Ramayanas.”77 In Ramanujan’s hugely influential essay “Three Hundred Ramayanas,” he argues that the myth is principally about “translation, transplantation, transposition” and that, as such, ­t here exist so many retellings that “one conception is quite abhorrent to ­those who hold another.”78 Suggesting that the Ramayana has never been an Ur-­text, but hundreds of translations, Ramanujan offers that the several differing endings surrounding Sita’s fate in par­tic­u­lar testify to the myth’s importance as a story of endless separations (between ­brother and ­brother, ­mothers and ­fathers, ­fathers and sons) and of irresoluble exile. In some versions (based on Valmiki’s version), Sita undergoes the “chastity test,” which she passes, but is sufficiently enraged that she chooses to leave Rama and Ayodhya, ­later giving birth to twins who grow up without knowing their f­ ather (they are ­later re­united with Rama when adults). This version lays emphasis not only on “Sita’s banishment” of Rama but also on reunions and a return to peace and order.79 In other renderings, Sita cannot reconcile herself to the fact that her honor is challenged, and ­after praying to the earth for rescue departs by entering into the ground, “a fissure of the earth,” the name Sita itself meaning “furrow” or “wound.”80 Sita’s descent into the earth could be read as her own attempt to salvage her dignity, and the fact that she feels compelled to do so despite being pregnant serves to highlight Rama’s misguided judgement. This version, bearing most similarities with No

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Pain’s rendering of Ma, provided for a “new concept of Sita” as agent, rebellious, and victorious in her own right against the standard idealizations of her as the paragon of patriarchal virtue.81 Ma’s increased desperation over the course of the novel, grief over the death of her son Rama and unrelenting physical and psychological abuse from Pa (her husband), lead to her eventual descent into what o ­ thers perceive of as madness, thus effectively foreclosing No Pain as ­simple paean to rural life or the female laborer. Ma’s lack of social resources in fact accentuate her empowering kinship with nature, her body oftentimes depicted in organic terms—­her brain referred to as a “seed growing,” her frail physique reminiscent of “burnt sugarcane” (21). Her organicity is significant for its characterization of her sensibility as a type of environmental acuity very much generated out of the “mud of deprivation” (Brathwaite), i.e., the rice fields and sugar estates she inhabits. The isolation that exposes the village’s remove from the modern world pronounce Ma’s intimacy with nature, her inventiveness serving to amplify the paradoxical condition in which social distress is mitigated through a keen understanding of the environment as succor. In an early scene, as Ma is sitting ­under a mango grove nursing a wound to her head inflicted by Pa, we witness her bodily transformation through her touch with nature. At first, she sits as a piece of “old cloth rammed into the corner of two tapia wall” (20). This dejected image is immediately inversed by what Ma does next. Gathering leaves from a nearby tree, Ma crushe[s] them between her slender palms. A greenish juice leaked out from her palms and fell on the ground [. . .] Ma looked at her right palm [and] it looked as if moss was growing in her palms [. . .] She gathered the green spots together [. . .] and made something like a green worm, then she lifted up her hand slowly as if the crushed leaves w ­ ere heavier than a stone. Slap! She slapped the green stuff on her forehead. (19)

Thus, Ma’s outward poverty and destitution, constantly inferred through a lack of basic resources such as electricity, food, dry clothes, or adequate housing, inform an intensely intimate relationship to nature and her acts of bravery and quick wit are applied to find endless cures to protect her c­ hildren from Pa’s drunken rages. To her ­children, Ma is “brave only as a ­woman is brave” (55), one time possessing all the strength of a spirit when she stays awake all night to drive away a mysterious evil force that Balraj felt “was biting and choking” him to death (56). On nights in which Pa’s drunken rage forces Ma to find a way to shelter her ­children overnight in the pouring rain, she is able to navigate the cane and rice fields during the darkest hours and in thundering storms to transform the cane field into a shelter for her sons. At first, Pandey and Rama are afraid to enter a space they fear is filled with mythical spirits and other life-­threatening forces of village lore hiding in the long leaves of the cane field. Ma continues despite the torrential rainfall and pitch darkness, collecting the “layers and layers of damp

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and rottening cane straws” lying strewn on the ground ­until she fi­nally makes them a “bed” by tying the canes into rows so that the tops form a roof (22). In this rare and exceptional inclusion of the alterior sensibility and ingenuity of the female Indian peasant, Ladoo effectively expands the trope of the peasant to not only include indenture’s afterlife in the Ca­rib­bean countryside, but does so through the figure of the rural Indian ­woman who has habitually been silenced, misrepresented, and tokenized in both the Ca­rib­bean and Indo-­ Caribbean literary canons. Ladoo’s novel thus reads as precursor to poet Mahadai Das’ rejoinder to recall the legacy of the rural female laborer and peasant, and to pay witness to the tribulations from which t­ hose like Ma strug­gle for freedom and are able to find their own mea­sure of escape only through inscrutable acts of self-­annihilation.

Rama in the Rice Field As the novel ends, Ma’s relationship to the land and soil links her enigmatically to her son, Rama, whom she has not seen again since the day he was taken to the hospital. Unlike the epic hero’s resplendent return to his kingdom in Ayodhya (­today celebrated as diwali, festival of lights), Ladoo’s young Rama returns but remains hidden and submerged in the dark depths of the rice fields. The siblings all believe in dif­fer­ent versions of what happens to their ­brother Rama ­after his death. Balraj believes that rats feed on him back at the hospital, Sunaree is content to think of Rama as a spirit changing shape and form, now dog, then jumbie bird, or h ­ uman. But Panday believes that his twin b ­ rother has turned into a spirit and returned to the rice fields to be near them, though forced to stay in hiding out of fear of Pa. According to Panday, no one has searched for Rama in the one place he has chosen to hide—­the flooded rice paddies. He dreams that his ­brother’s spirit resides in the rain-­seeped terrain ­because of the deep cut ­running down his belly (the coroner’s incision) which, for Panday, is an asset that allows Rama to hide safely in the submerged rice field. Rama’s incision achieves mythical proportion in a dream sequence: Rama was living in the ­water. He drowned in the riceland ­because he had a long cut in his belly. Rama was buried in the ­water. The ­water snakes ­were searching for him, trying hard to find him. The snakes ­were biting the mud with their long teeth and looking for Rama, ­because they wanted to eat him . . . ​ Rama was buried in the cemetery . . . ​Then he went inside the riceland ­because he was afraid of Pa . . . ​Rama was living in the riceland. (112–113)

To assuage his younger b ­ rother, Balraj invents a rhyme to ask his beloved “crappo” fish if, indeed, his ­brother is with them in the rice fields: “crappo fish crappo fish in dat wadder [. . .] crappo fish crappo fish in dat wadder . . . ​tell me tell me if Rama in dat wadder” (110, original italics).

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Rama’s final oneness with Carib Island’s soil, and specifically, the rice field, decisively translates the mythical interpretation of exile, i.e., banishment from the mainland, to suggest new beginnings in the Ca­rib­bean post-­passage. This highly suggestive implantation (and transplantation) of the Ramayana’s eponymous hero with the Ca­rib­bean rice paddy fields revises kala pani exile within the productive dynamism of diasporic consciousness so that new ways of “living in the ricefield” become essential to (post)indenture belonging. The absence of (Rama’s) physical return in the novel, on the other hand, is h ­ ere meaningful as a pre­sen­ta­tion of exile as a permanent condition which, in an indenture poetics, firmly dislodges the primacy of the ancestral. Unlike the mythological narrative, t­ here is no fairy­tale kingdom eagerly awaiting the return of the heroes upon the completion of valiant acts and ­t here is no illumined path charting safe passage back home. Th ­ ere are, instead, memories of the departed—­Rama, Ma, and Karan—­who in dif­fer­ent ways must be remembered through their indelible ties to the land. Invoking both Rama and Sita’s fate from the myth, Ladoo refashions exile and banishment as stages in a rite of passage that do not so much lead to reinitiation with a remembered home as much as forge renewed meanings of home and homecoming; a belongingness, in other words, that issues from exile and displacement and grows out of and from the “paddy leaves” of indenture history. Thus, Carib Island becomes the “home” not of an India remembered, but one newly transplanted. In No Pain it is not Ma who is returned to the earth (like Sita), though her eating of the rice field in which Rama now “lives” and her subsequent vanis­hing into the wilderness figuratively conflates the fate of both ­mother and son. Ma’s ingestion of soil represents a bold, albeit inscrutable, act that, far from being a tragic denouement, successfully forecloses any possibility of simply reading into, thus determining or judging, Ma’s actions. In the last chapter, Ma runs away from Pa, yet again, this time carousing the overflowing rice paddies swallowing handfuls of earth. She darts like a bolt of lightning “flash! flash! flash!” first in the riceland, then by the barahar tree, fi­nally seen by the mango tree where she dances alone “too mad to care,” drinking ­water from the drain, “[pulling] out bamboo grass with her hands and [kicking] up the dry barahar leaves with her feet” (118). As the c­ hildren watch, they come to think of Ma’s grunts and gasps as indistinguishable from the sounds emitted by bamboo and basmati-­grass rice fields, and her ingestion of mud transforms her utterly in the eyes of her c­ hildren. They misinterpret her adoring caresses and no longer see her as their beloved Ma but as a malevolent spirit intent on eating them alive. Taking flight from their fear, Ma dis­appears into the darkness of the surrounding forests. In this graphic finale, Ladoo’s enactment of soil consumption gestures at two gendered narratives in which freedom is associated with the land: geophagy in Ca­rib­bean colonial history and Sita’s reunification with the earth in the Ramayana. Both instances (i.e., Sita and Ma) posit the earth as solace and salvation

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against an outer social order that threatens and (erroneously) judges the ­woman. Whereas Sita’s revolt against Rama’s accusations culminates in her consumption by the earth, an act she chooses for herself, Ma’s is devoid of any godly intervention. In line with the theme of the novel, Ma’s eating from the rice field lays accent on the profound grief she feels for the loss of her son Rama, whose spirit supposedly thrives in that terrain. Her ingestion of the soil, while being the novel’s final symbolic cue to her specific form of kinship to the land, is also an act of gendered re­sis­tance that has historically in the Ca­rib­bean been (mis)read as a sign of madness or weakness. Within the anticolonial discourse of creolization, however, “eating dirt” was not a sign of malnutrition or loss of m ­ ental 82 stability but an expression of gendered re­sis­tance. As an act of geophagy, therefore, Ma’s action can be viewed as a form of rebellion bearing close resemblance to a tactic utilized by slaves, in par­tic­u­lar female slaves, that may rest on the cusp between survival and self-­harm but which powerfully appropriates the idea of “failure” as re­sis­tance. As Ma eats from the soil associated with her son’s symbolic interment, she not only refuses his death but this action elevates Carib Island into its own mythical realm so that a return to “Ayodhya” (the ancestral utopia) is no longer necessary or tenable. A ­ fter Ma’s disappearance, Nanny guides the ­children in search of their ­mother in the dark while broad strokes of lightning “dance(d) over their heads like golden forks and silver spoons and the thunder rolled and rolled and rolled as if the sky God was beating heavy drums in the sky” (133). In response, Nanny sounds her dholak, “doom doom doomed! [. . .] go g­ oing gone!” and beats it “with life; with love [. . .]as if a spirit was bawling in the forest” (134). As if harnessing nature’s ele­ments to punctuate her own rhythmic beats, Nanny’s drum “ripped through the darkness like a knife” guiding the ­family as they “moved deeper and deeper into the forest [with] the rain falling upon their heads from heaven” (134). Ma’s final disappearance into unchartered territory—­neither cane field nor rice field—­gestures at a ­f uture for “coolie ­woman” that may lie beyond and outside the historically over­burdened sites of pain and ­labor. The wild space of the forest, however nebulous or threatening it may seem, obliquely points to a precolonial time and place first suggested in the name “Carib Island.” The novel’s strategically enigmatic ending thus underscores the liminal positionality of post-­ indenture rural peasants such as Ma. While her agency is asserted by her disappearance into a space hitherto untouched by plantocracy or indenture history, this kinship perhaps magnifies the “junglee coolie’s” continued placelessness. Ladoo’s female peasant Ma embodies the economic desperation and social remoteness of the rural peasant community, which, by extension, exposes their continuing ambiguous place in the greater sociopo­liti­cal fabric. Her profound isolation, leading eventually to her complete disappearance, amplifies both her and her community’s uncertain prospects in the ­f uture. Nevertheless, Ladoo’s emphasis on intracultural forms of revision and innovation among non-­urban

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agricultural Indian communities not only works against the assumption of negative assimilation associated with this cross-­section of the Indian community but also foregrounds the importance of belongingness for a group other­w ise removed from the vis­i­ble and modern events of greater society and whose “invisible hands” in the shaping of Ca­rib­bean civilization, as Lamming contends, have gone neglected for too long. No Pain stands apart for its depiction of peasant Indians contextualized wholly within the ruralscapes of post-­emancipation sugar estates and rice paddies, and it remains one of the most unabashedly raw repre­sen­ta­tions of their acute social and physical alienation. In contrast to contemporaneous fictions revolving around in­de­pen­dence, modernity, urbanity, and (im)migration, No Pain portrays the acute isolation of a group whose cultural evolution infuses the peasant indenture environment, a foundational site through which the author asserts the belongingness of rural Indians. The ambivalent ending, which cements the utter isolation of the rural Indian community of the fictional Carib Island, does not detract from the novel’s concerted efforts to enchant the reader with the richly complex cultural world of the villa­gers of Tola Trace. The issue of “origins” (in Brand’s sense) for a post-­India indenture poetics is broached by No Pain’s cultural Hindu worldview, which pre­sents caste identities, rituals, and mores as continually shifting and modifying vectors among its rural population, a group whose extreme isolation paradoxically affords them unpre­ce­dented freedom to reinterpret caste and its strictures. Though hopelessly vulnerable to nature’s ele­ments—­t hunder, lightning, and poisonous snakes and scorpions—­ and haplessly ill-­equipped in the ­matters of modern society—­accentuated by the collapse of the bamboo bridge during August’s torrential floods—­Ladoo’s rural peasantry persist in a climate of sociocultural flux and malleability that challenges ste­reo­t ypical repre­sen­ta­tions of a group typically viewed as separate from and suspicious of creolization and cultural translation, and as exiles in and of the Ca­rib­bean. No Pain underscores the contradictory conditions whereby the temporary site of ­labor for the indentured evolves into a site of permanent sociopo­liti­cal alienation that nevertheless gives new meaning to the significance of home and belonging even if ­t here are no assurances as to what ­t hese alternate lands of rebirth may offer.

chapter 4

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(En)Gendering Indenture in Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night (1992)

While ­earlier chapters have sought to outline an indenture poetics marked by the gradual decentering of ancestral notions of indenture exile and passage, this analy­sis of Shani Mootoo’s debut novel, Cereus Blooms at Night (1996), considers the final stage of this evolution in the author’s critique of exile as absolute loss and of the creolized exile as polluted outcast.1 Through the inclusion of varied and ongoing “crossings”—­whether physical, cultural, ideological, or sexual—­Mootoo’s novel recharacterizes migration and exile as indispensable and reproductive, rather than taboo and annihilating, to evolving constructs of Indo-­Caribbean identity and belonging post-­passage. Mootoo further controverts the ancestral framework by recharacterizing the exiled as beloved, whose ties to the homeland are never wholly severed. Similar to Ismith Khan and Harold Ladoo, Mootoo re-­historicizes the con­temporary Ca­rib­bean from a (post)indenture historical and cultural perspective. In Khan’s Jumbie Bird, the newness of postcolonial in­de­pen­dence serves as the backdrop in which the author reimagines Indo-­ Caribbean constructs of Indianness in its evolution beyond India. Harold Ladoo’s No Pain Like This Body, published a de­cade ­later, extends on this paradigm in his portrait of rural post-­i ndenture Indian peasants, conventionally viewed as culturally static and fossilized, whose creolization becomes instrumental to a post-­India indenture diasporic consciousness. Both novels not only demonstrate the critical significance of creolization to indenture poetics but also signal the importance Indo-­Caribbean lit­er­a­ture has had in exploring the changing constructs of Indianness within indenture’s own diasporic framework centered in the Ca­rib­bean. 131

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Though Mootoo’s pioneering significance to a feminist Indo-­Caribbean poetics cannot be overstated, it is nonetheless her works’ global import to queer feminist literary activism that has eclipsed the specific importance her debut novel has played in recharacterizing exile and belonging from a (post)indenture and gender-­inclusive perspective. Academic analyses providing ecological, phenomenological, feminist, queer, lesbian, Canadian, and, especially, diasporic South Asian readings of this debut novel examine indenture as useful background and context without, however, delving adequately into the indenture motifs and tropes central to Mootoo’s exploration of migration and belonging in specifically indenture cultural and historical contexts. In par­tic­u­lar, her works’ reception as queer and feminist writing has come at the cost of excluding their exposition on issues of (post)indenture gender dynamics. By resituating Cereus within a gendered indenture framework and poetics, therefore, this reading shifts attention to the novel’s exposition of kala pani’s heteronormative constructs of exile and the exiled, both of which disproportionately ­favor men’s choices for transplantation and agency while stigmatizing ­t hose of ­women and queer subjects for whom migration and expatriation are especially essential for survival. Within the context of Indo-­Caribbean cultural and literary study, while the concept jahaji-­hood has helped foreground the unique collective ethos of indenture passage, the phrase has continued to place “emphasis on male suffering, exile and fraternity” while committing “the historical erasure of indentured ­women’s lives in the male diasporic subject’s psyche.”2 An indenture w ­ oman’s introduction to cultural worlds beyond India afforded unpre­ce­dented opportunities for reinvention even as it also secured her complete excommunication from the mainland. In this hegemonic rendering of overseas migration, the chauvinist under­pinnings of kala pani passage as annihilation are explicit in the fact that an indenture w ­ oman’s alleged corruption from exposure to Western civilization ­under plantocracy did not lead to initiatives to rescue her from this fate. Rather, crossing the ocean was associated with an individual ­woman’s own cultural and moral infidelity, and not as a necessary outcome of her involvement in a colonialist l­ abor system that operated on deception and displacement overseas. Engendering indenture even in the con­temporary Ca­rib­bean context is necessary to reveal the multi-­layered hierarchies that continue to position Indian ­women’s desires and aspirations as antithetical to Indo-­Caribbean constructs of belonging. As Wells and Hosein contend, feminist praxis in places like Trinidad and Guyana must navigate “an oppositional ‘modern’ Creole identity[,] [w]hile Indo-­Trinidadian men are ­free to compete with Afro-­Trinidadian men in the Creole public space, Indo-­Trinidadian ­women are held as symbolic markers of their culture, f­amily and tradition, and therefore have a greater responsibility to maintain ethnic and cultural purity.”3 Gabrielle Hosein identifies this tension as an example of a “gender-­differential creolisation” that affords young ­women and men unequal opportunities to be both Indian and Ca­rib­bean. As she argues,

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whereas males “retain” credibility and power as “au­then­tic” Indians even while becoming creolized, females “ris[k] loss of ‘Indianness’ [. . .] and loss of status from shame.” 4 W ­ omen’s own acts of cultural creolization and their re­sis­tance against heteropatriarchal cultural norms, as seen in the well-­documented case of the “chutney” controversies of the 1990s,5 continue to be heavi­ly policed by both the Indo-­Caribbean and mainstream communities as a betrayal of their very Indianness and/or as evidence of malfunction within the Indian community. The opening of horizons for w ­ omen continues to be construed as problematic precisely ­because, for the Indo-­Caribbean ­woman, “claiming the feminist identity is seen as rejecting an [Indian] identity b ­ ecause a key aspect of that identity includes a gender hierarchy implicit within the f­ amily structure.” 6 The strong visibility of mostly male writers in the Indo-­Caribbean literary tradition ­until the 1990s, when Mootoo’s first novel was published, and the general assumption that Indo-­Caribbean writing was a predominantly male enterprise throughout the period in which the region was experiencing its greatest literary flourishing in the post-­independence years, reinforced and perpetuated the image of the passive and docile Indo-­Caribbean w ­ oman that first achieved its currency during the period of colonial indenture. The general climate of “almost total neglect of [Ca­rib­bean] ­women’s writing pre-1970” has indeed been even more pronounced in the case of Indo-­Caribbean ­women, with almost no attention given to their “own politics and ethics of re­sis­tance and liberation.”7 For Indo-­Caribbean ­women, especially, as Poynting points out, the general ste­ reo­t ype “that Indian ­can’t write” obscured the other real­ity of gender in­equality within the community in which “the vast majority of rural Indo-­Caribbean ­women w ­ ere condemned to illiteracy, [which] also carried several power­ful cultural ste­reo­types of backwardness, passivity, and silence.”8 Though it has traditionally been the case that w ­ omen w ­ ere considered essential to passing down cultural stories and practices considered impor­tant to both the transposition and evolution of Indianness in the Ca­rib­bean, Indo-­Caribbean ­women ­were held back from both writing and literary activism by being systematically barred from most forms of social agency through the denial of key resources that left most “largely illiterate and under-­educated” ­until the 1950s.9 The difficult entry of Indo-­ Caribbean ­women’s writing, both literary and theoretical, according to ­others, has also been due to the “assumption that Afro-­Caribbean feminism . . . ​already cleared space for Indian ­women” despite the fact that Indo-­Caribbean feminisms have attempted to theorize impor­tant “conceptual approaches that consider the transoceanic dimensions of indentureship and post-­indentureship.”10 The definitive outpouring of Indo-­Caribbean ­women’s literary expression is considered to have begun in the 1990s, with a majority of novels by writers from the anglophone Ca­rib­bean living in the United Kingdom, United States, and Canada, but several Indo-­Caribbean ­women ­were in fact published writers in the same de­cades in which mostly male Indo-­Caribbean writers ­were thought

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to be shaping an Indo-­Caribbean literary canon. Though many of t­ hese works by Indo-­Caribbean ­women did not receive the kind of international fame and readership as ­t hose by writers (mostly male) living in Eu­rope and North Amer­ i­ca, ­t hese first publications ­were of tremendous importance to interracial and interregional conversations on Ca­rib­bean feminisms. Such early works include Rajkumari Singh’s acclaimed poetry collection I Want to Be a Poetess of My ­People (1977), Jan Lo Shinebourne’s novel The Last En­glish Plantation (1988), Mahadai Das’ poetry collection Bones (1988), and Lakshmi Persaud’s fictional autobiography Butterfly in the Wind (1990). Singh’s poem “Per Ajie—­A Tribute to the First Immigrant W ­ oman” (1971), for instance, is an early example of an Indo-­Caribbean ­woman writer’s explicit attempt to overturn the widely accepted ste­reo­t ype of indenture ­women as passive. In the twenty-­fi rst c­ entury, novels such as Ramabai Espinet’s Swinging Bridge (2003), Peggy Mohan’s Jahajin (2005), Joy Mahabir’s Jouvert (2006), and Krystal Sital’s Secrets We Kept: Three ­Women of Trinidad (2018), develop indenture-­specific motifs of the sea voyage and passage to reconstruct indenture legacies from the perspective of con­temporary ­women’s migrations and experiences. Specifically Indo-­Caribbean feminist literary tropes such as “bindi,” “pumpkin vine,” and “jahaji-­bhain” (boat s­ isters) begin to emerge and develop in ­these novels published in the twenty-­first c­ entury. The steady growth in Indo-­Caribbean ­women’s fiction has in turn led to several critical anthologies that have attempted to outline the specific aesthetics of Indo-­ Caribbean w ­ omen’s writing. Notable publications include, but are not l­imited to, Mariam Pirbhai’s Mythologies of Migration, Vocabularies of Indenture: Novels of the South Asian Diaspora in Africa, the Ca­rib­bean, and Asia-­Pacific (2009), Rosanne Kanhai’s Bindi: The Multi-­Faceted Lives of Indo-­Caribbean ­Women (2011), Critical Perspectives on Indo-­Caribbean W ­ omen’s Lit­er­a­ture edited by Joy Mahabir and Mariam Pirbhai (2013), and Indo-­Caribbean Feminist Thought: Genealogies, Theories, Enactments edited by Gabrielle Hosein and Lisa Outar (2016). While a transnational approach has helped relate intersections between South Asian and post-­indenture Indo-­Caribbean ­women, this standard framing of gendered Indo-­Caribbean studies has elided critically impor­tant tensions within the community regionally, in which Indian ­women’s attempts at cultural evolution and production against Western, Indian, and African patriarchal forms have been and continue to be constructed as antithetical to dominant ideas of “au­then­ tic” Indianness. To read Indo-­Caribbean ­women’s fiction as an addendum within South Asian diasporic contexts, as is commonly the case with Shani Mootoo’s literary oeuvre, furthermore mitigates the critical role such works have played in bringing indenture po­liti­cal history to the foreground in repre­sen­ta­ tions of con­temporary (Indo)Ca­rib­bean gender issues. On the contrary, reading Indo-­Caribbean ­women’s fiction as also responding to indenture’s own gendered legacies would help reverse an academic (and specifically literary) tra-

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dition in which the specific par­ameters of Indo-­Caribbean feminisms have been subsumed ­u nder the binary categories of “South Asian” or “Ca­r ib­bean,” thus obscuring what Brij Lal identifies as the unique “subaltern” nature of gendered indenture re­sis­tance. In par­tic­u ­lar, the South Asian diasporic label habitually affixed to Mootoo’s works, which are undoubtedly some of the earliest and most well known within Ca­rib­bean and Indo-­Caribbean w ­ omen’s writing, has played no small part in contributing to the belated recognition of all Indo-­Caribbean ­women’s contributions to engendering a Ca­rib­bean poetics rooted in the experience of indenture. Such deeply oppositional conceptual frameworks that continue to mire the study of indenture’s “herstories” can be seen to prolong the effacement of both the diversity and complexities of Indo-­Caribbean ­women’s writing and Indo-­ Caribbean w ­ omen’s literary achievements. The need to reposition the study of Indo-­Caribbean ­women’s writing within the context of indenture and post-­ indenture gendered histories is the cornerstone of the 2013 publication, Critical Perspectives on Indo-­Caribbean ­Women’s Lit­er­at­ ure, edited by Joy Mahabir and Mariam Pirbhai. In this first ever full-­length collection of essays dedicated to exploring Indo-­Caribbean ­women’s writing, Mahabir and Pirbhai outline a “pervasive tradition of misrepre­sen­ta­tion” in Ca­rib­bean lit­er­a­ture and literary analyses which are “overtly characterized by critical discourses on Afro-­Caribbean writers and male Indo-­Caribbean writers.”11 At first, this line of argument may seem to merely echo some of ­t hose made in Brinda Mehta’s critically acclaimed publication Diasporic (Dis)Locations: Indo-­Caribbean ­Women Writers Negotiate the Kala Pani, published more than a de­cade and a half ago (in 2004), in which Mehta outlines the “invisibility” and “multiple dislocations” of the figure of the Indo-­Caribbean ­woman due to “a par­tic­u­lar literary and cultural eclipsing by their black counter­parts, by the diasporic hegemony of South Asian writers from North Amer­i­ca and Britain, [and] by Indian men and by ­women writers from India.”12 As a result of this “pedagogical and scholarly flaw,” Mehta suggests, female writers of Indo-­Caribbean descent have themselves experienced “a double literary displacement that has minimized their capacity to effectively engage in crucial issues of nation building, race, difference, and identity.”13 In spite of certain similarities and points of agreement between ­t hese two paradigm-­shifting works, however, they differ in their identification of key issues about Indo-­Caribbean ­women’s writings and their link to indenture historiography, which explain why the field of Indo-­Caribbean ­women’s lit­er­a­ture and critical perspectives on it have emerged only in the first de­cade and a half of the twenty-­first ­century. While Mehta’s book does argue against the overshadowing of Indo-­Caribbean ­women’s writing by NRI and South Asian writers, the scope of her argument stays within a geopo­liti­cal binary in which the gendered politics of Indo-­Caribbean aesthetic production is studied alongside ancient texts from the erstwhile motherland and framed within the discourse of South Asian

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theorists with ­little attempt to contextualize Hindu cultural practices in the Ca­r ib­bean as products of indenture. In the chapter titled “Framing Indo-­ Caribbean Female Subjectivity,” for instance, questions raised about the limitations placed on Indo-­Caribbean ­women writers are further delimited by the use of ancient Hindu motifs and frameworks to qualify an Indo-­Caribbean femininity. While, on the one hand, asking w ­ hether a “feminine revisioning [is] pos­si­ble . . . ​g iven the overriding stranglehold of Hindu patriarchy,” Mehta invokes feminine figures from Hindu epics to define con­temporary Indo-­ Caribbean womanhood—­“Can the Draupadis, Sitas and Lakshmis of yesteryear shed their veils, both psychological and material, to be reinscribed in an active fictionalized pre­sent?”14 Mehta’s work promises to “interrogate Indianness” to ask if “Indian w ­ omen and their diasporic counter­parts share common mythologies or histories of gendered dislocation,” yet does so “within the specific rubric of a diasporic dislocation, or multiple dislocations, to reinforce the idea of a series of forced evictions or primary displacements from the ancestral land.”15 Thus, in asking how Draupadi et al. can be “reinscribed” in fictions of the contemporaneous Ca­rib­bean pre­sent, Mehta’s study of Indo-­Caribbean ­women’s writing as diasporic negotiations across the kala pani remain tethered to the South Asian past. Quite strikingly, the aesthetic and po­liti­cal impulses of Khal Torabully’s Coolitude are criticized as a “depoliticized agenda of cultural affirmation [and] displaced imaginary construction of nostalgia” b ­ ecause it “does not lead to the inscription of ancestral memory.”16 Further on, the Indo-­Guyanese poet Rajkumari Singh’s efforts to reimagine “coolie” identity in transnational terms17 are read in Mehta’s study as “romanticizations” that are ultimately “short-­sighted ­because . . . ​not accompanied by the necessary decolonization of the term [“coolie”]” which “reinforces cultural ste­reo­types and racism against Indians.”18 Nevertheless, ­these statements are followed by Mehta’s suggestion that “each diasporic location” must “negotiate its own tryst with ‘coolie culture’ ” in order for the weight of this word to have a new destiny. In this same chapter, Mehta offers that her own construct, “attitudinal cooliehood,” which she ascribes to the intellectually “slavish” convictions of the “post-­independence Indian imaginary” (emblematized by the Bengali indigenous elite), is a more fitting rubric with which to analyze the female Indian characters portrayed in Persaud’s and Shinebourne’s novels of colonial Trinidad and Guyana, respectively (54). Mahabir and Pirbhai, on the other hand, shift the axis of their inquiry so as to decenter the significance of South Asia in a radical way, thus positioning Indo-­ Caribbean ­women’s writing and its evolution within its own diasporic and transnational iteration rather than as “rescriptions” of the ancestral. In Critical Perspectives, therefore, the emphasis on “Indian w ­ omen’s experiences in plantation and post-­plantation Ca­rib­bean socie­ties” broadens the scope of Indo-­ Caribbean ­women’s writing by appreciating how the legacy of indenture, rather than exile from India, is central to the interrogation of Indianness locally and

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regionally in post-­plantation locations.19 Similarly, in Hosein’s and Outar’s Indo-­Caribbean Feminist Thought (2016), a signal publication in its own genre, the editors outline the need for radically expanded paradigms that would reflect Indo-­Caribbean ­women’s lives as “products of indentureship,” a “theorizing and activism that traces [their] genealogy through indentureship and post-­indentureship experience rather than through an Indian subcontinental diaspora framework.”20 A feminist Indo-­Caribbean poetics such as Mootoo’s not only challenges the male-­centered “ethics of community epitomized by jahaji-­hood” but as well “foreground[s] t­ hose aspects of ethnic Indian ­women’s experiences, past and pre­sent, that remain social taboos, such as incest, marital rape, domestic vio­lence and alcoholism.”21 The feminist under­pinnings of most Indo-­Caribbean ­women’s lit­er­a­ture, according to Pirbhai, thus responds directly to “the limitations of indenture historiography [which] like the limitations of Indo-­Caribbean lit­er­a­ture itself” has avoided gender disparities perpetuated ­u nder indenture’s one-­t hird quota that continue to limit a “gender-­inclusive articulation of the diasporic and national imaginary.”22 Undoubtedly as a response to the habitual erasure of Mootoo’s critical significance to a specifically post-­indenture Indo-­Caribbean feminist poetics, Narain, Donnell, and O’Callaghan, in a special edition of the Journal of West Indian Lit­er­a­ture devoted to Shani Mootoo, contend that a “regionally specific consideration” of her work was considered necessary precisely ­because her oeuvre has so often been “received within frameworks of diasporic, queer or Canadian writing” in spite of the fact that her works “insistently write of and to the Ca­rib­bean” and “issue a roll call to some of the most sensitive issues around sexuality in the region.”23 As the editors suggest, Cereus’s international acclaim as the first avowedly queer-­centric work to end the “literary silence around sexuality and non-­heteronormative desire” in the Ca­rib­bean has led to considerably less attention given to Mootoo’s repre­sen­ta­tion of “Indians who have made the kala pani crossing.”24 Cereus, the editors suggest, was one of the earliest works to provide a way to imagine “Ca­rib­bean personhood” outside of “conventional heteronormative gender constructs” while at the same time being “a harsh exposé of homophobic and misogynist attitudes in the Ca­rib­be­an.”25 It is as well, I suggest, the earliest novel to contextualize ­these same injustices within historical and cultural (post)indenture contexts ­shaped continually by multiple and dif­fer­ ent forms of exile experienced by heterosexual men and w ­ omen, lesbians, transgender, and queer Indo-­Caribbeans both in the Ca­rib­bean and its diasporas.

Cereus Blooms at Night In Cereus, the octogenarian female protagonist, Mala Ramchandin, ostensibly demonstrates all the tenacity and bravery associated with the ajie figure, indenture’s “heroic archetype,”26 though in the eyes of her village in Lantanacamara

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(a fictional island in the anglophone Ca­rib­bean) she has remained the local “madwoman” for many de­cades. Most ostensibly, Mala is clearly damaged from years of sexual abuse by her f­ather, Chandin Ramchandin, which leaves her incomprehensible ­until the very last pages of the novel. While the main plot centers on Mala’s slow and painful rehabilitation a­ fter “­going mad” in order to cope with serial forms of abuse and abandonment, her traumatization is intimately linked with her f­ather’s own psychological breakdown from his induction into the Canadian Presbyterian Mission as a young boy and his subsequent alienation as someone forced to culturally abandon and/or trade in his Indianness. Chandin’s increasingly debilitating self-­loathing a­ fter his entry into the Mission’s fold, aggravated by his inability to wed the Reverend’s ­daughter, Lavinia, who he ­later finds is in a romantic relationship with his wife, Sarah (Mala’s m ­ other), lead to his evolution into the ste­reo­t ypical violent, rum-­sodden Indo-­Caribbean patriarch and, perversely, his self-­justified sexual abuse of his ­daughters Mala and Asha Ramchandin. Unlike her m ­ other and s­ ister, who both flee the country to escape Chandin’s oppressive control, Mala chooses to stay in Lantanacamara and to remain in the ­family home in anticipation for the time when Sarah and Asha ­will return. Unlike her m ­ other and ­sister, Mala also chooses to stay in order to remain as her ­father’s caretaker, even feeling acute pangs of guilt when she and her childhood beau Ambrose Mohanty fi­nally consummate their romance ­after he returns from his studies in the Shivering Northern Wetlands (SNW), a fictional place assumed to be somewhere in Eu­rope. On his return, Ambrose is an adult man much bolder in his courtship of Mala, though he begins to see signs of Chandin’s abuse and fi­nally grasps the real­ity Mala has withheld from him throughout their childhood. On the fateful day that Chandin returns early from the bar and catches the secret lovers, Ambrose flees the scene in fear and leaves Mala alone to face Chandin’s wrath. Watching in shock and disbelief as Ambrose’s figure recedes into the distance, Mala acts swiftly to thwart Chandin from hurting her lover. From his relative safety, as Ambrose looks back, he sees “instead of the w ­ oman he had made love to the day before, an unrecognizable wild creature with a blood-­stained face, frothing at the mouth” who was mysteriously “hacking uncontrollably at the furniture in the drawing room” (390). U ­ ntil Ambrose and Mala are re­united many years l­ater, Ambrose has sought refuge in self-­isolation, sleeping for days on end and awakening once a month only to pack extravagant parcels of meats, cheeses, and choco­lates for Mala delivered by his son, Otoh—­a woman-­turned-­i nto-­a-­man without a phallus—­who ­w ill eventually become romantically involved with Nurse Tyler, Mala’s healer and narrator of the story. When the novel begins, the h ­ ouse and garden in which Mala has hidden a­ fter Ambrose’s abandonment are on fire. Villa­gers who have studiously avoided both the Ramchandin ­family and coming to the aid of the d ­ aughters spill out onto the street to gawk and gossip. In their minds, the fire had come as a purge to

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fi­nally rid them of Mala, and when the judge decides on a compassionate ruling to send her to the Paradise Alms House instead of prison, they feel “cheated of the rare opportunity to have a ­woman criminal in their midst” (20). Mala’s per­ sis­tent silence during her rehabilitation, which o ­ thers perceive as proof of her “madness,” is in fact intelligible to Tyler as “symptoms of trauma” (29). Indeed, Mootoo’s repre­sen­ta­tion of Mala’s madness as an “altered state(s) of being”27 is critical to her framing of gendered re­sis­tance as inherently and strategically unintelligible, thus, submissive only in appearance. Like a dormant flower aching to bloom, Mala responds to Tyler, a single touch enough to “turn her from the incarnation of fearful tales into a living ­human being” (25). Tyler senses immediately that “it was no accident that [Mala] chose to chatter only in [his] presence” and approaches Mala’s body as if w ­ ere a text, training himself to decipher “as if by Braille, her twitches and gasps” so as to give “purpose to listening and to sifting, cutting and sewing the lot” (101). Through the pro­cess of weaving Mala’s traumatic and disjointed memories of incest, domestic abuse, and abandonment by her ­mother (Sarah) and ­sister (Asha), Tyler begins to contextualize the varied reasons why o ­ thers have chosen to leave and escape from Lantanacamara to the SNW or Canada in order to survive. Tyler’s own ambiguous sexuality, being “neither properly man nor ­woman but some in-­between, unnamed ­t hing,” had once been the principal reason for his marginalization, and he had as well fled to the SNW as a way to hide a “perversion” he had hoped would become “invisible or of no consequence to ­people to whom my foreignness is what would be strange” (87). Ruminating on pos­si­ble lessons from the dif­fer­ent decisions made by Sarah, Asha, Mala, Chandin, and himself, Tyler won­der[s] at how many of us, feeling unsafe and unprotected, ­either end up ­running far away from every­t hing we know and love, or staying and simply ­going mad. I have de­cided ­today that neither option is more or less noble than the other. They are merely dif­fer­ent ways of coping, and we each must cope as best we can. (160)

The equation of healing with the acts of listening, recording, and writing (Tyler’s actions on Mala’s behalf) send a power­ful message about the reader’s role in humanizing a figure typically relegated to the peripheries of their reading horizon. With Tyler, we become witness to the fervent and urgent thoughts uttered by Mala in frog calls, childlike rhymes, and birdsong which require a new kind of listening. The novel’s structure similarly emphasizes the need for readers to adopt the kind of open-­endedness Mala has had to practice her entire life. The novel, as it turns out, has all along been a long letter to the absent and missing Asha written by Tyler for Mala. The missive-­novel ends with an emphasis on Mala’s enduring patience for any news of Asha and, as Tyler suggests to the recipient, her “arrival. She expects you any day soon. You are, to her, the promise of a cereus-­scented breeze on a Paradise night” (421). As she awaits the

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return of her beloved, the reader too must end the tale by participating in a manner of interpretive postponement—­w ill Mala fi­nally recognize Ambrose and ­will they fall in love again? ­Will Sarah and Lavinia ever be located and ­w ill they return? W ­ ill Asha ever receive Tyler’s call across the oceans, sent forth without knowing if it w ­ ill ever reach its destination? Does all this even m ­ atter, Tyler ultimately asks, and can escape and flight be seen as indispensable, rather than antithetical, to constructs of home and belonging for t­ hose who must migrate? While Tyler had once felt the need to “rationalize [Asha’s] leaving and [Mala’s] staying—­and, as many see it—­going mad” (160), neither staying nor leaving are noble(r) options, both being forms of “coping as best we [the forgotten and marginalized] can.” Tyler’s own “coming out” pro­cess occurs si­mul­ta­neously with the writing of the Ramchandin ­family tragedy and is due to Mala’s own skills of perception. It is Mala who steals a nurse’s uniform and nylon stockings from the clothesline for Tyler, thus initiating his metamorphosis ­u ntil he feels completed with “rounded full breasts and a cavernous tunnel singing between [his] legs” (135). Mala’s “madness” may be the sign and symptom of her continuing ostracization and alienation, but it attunes her to Tyler’s desires and it is she who guides him from a “suspended namelessness in the limbo state between existence and non-­ existence” to a self-­confidence in his own true nature (137). Similarly, when Otoh begins his own gender experimentations, he feels an inexplicable urge to share his secrets with Mala, to strip himself of clothes in her presence and say, “Look! See? See all this? I am dif­fer­ent! You can trust me [and] I w ­ ill be your friend” (216). The calculated decoding Tyler commits to in order to translate Mala’s speech, and the profound need Otoh feels to gain the trust of the village outcast, foreground the kind of attitudinal shift Mootoo suggests is necessary to rehumanize the Indo-­Caribbean ­woman and to reinterpret her silence and otherness as integral to gendered forms of agency and survival.

Indenture’s ­Daughter Mootoo’s redemptive portrayal of a habitually misrepresented figure in Indo-­ Caribbean and Ca­rib­bean lit­er­a­ture serves a radical corrective function similar to that of Antoinette Cosway in Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, a work Michele Cliff accredits with fi­nally interrupting the conventional erasure of the Ca­rib­ bean ­woman in Western lit­er­a­ture. In the essay “Caliban’s D ­ aughter,” Cliff describes the complex burden felt by Afro-­Caribbean writers such as herself who are educated to become carriers of the “colonizer’s world,” but who ultimately choose to “reject speechlessness” by “reverting” to a natu­ral state of “wildness” as part of their recuperation.28 Thus, Cliff argues, her own choice to identify as “Caliban’s d ­ aughter,” rather than Prospero’s, lays claim to her self-­identification as a “(wild) child [freed] to speak, albeit in a tongue she/he does not own.”29 A

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story told from Bertha’s perspective provides complexity, dignity, and humanity to a character other­w ise received as the deranged Ca­rib­bean “mad w ­ oman” in Charlotte Bronte’s canonized work Jane Eyre. Antoinette’s narrative, as Cliff suggests, foregrounds a “view from the inside” that offers a colonized w ­ oman’s critique of empire’s cultural patriarchy and the maddening constraints that eventually control her life, body, and sanity.30 In Cliff’s analogy, the Jamaican terms ruinate and ruination—­both words signifying the reclamation of self by ­t hose who choose to be “wild”—­evoke the imagery of soil and land being reclaimed by the “uncontrolled, uncontrollable, chaotic forest” once strangled u ­ nder the architectural pressures of empire’s civilizing mission.31 Madness and wildness no longer function as incontrovertible proof of the derangement and chaos of native Ca­rib­be­ans and their lived realities, and instead persist as the recycled “script[s]” used to imagine a new historicity into being. Furthermore, in renaming Bertha Rochester “Antoinette Cosway,” Cliff suggests, Rhys fashions Antoinette as a “causeway . . . ​a bridge between the Ca­r ib­bean and ­England, living proof of contact,” and is “re-­locating her, re-­identifying her as a Ca­r ib­bean w ­ oman.”32 As an embodiment of the silence and secrecy that have been instrumental to ­women’s re­sis­tance and survival, Mala too serves as the metonymic “bridge” that inscribes the suffering and trauma of both indenture and post-­indenture ­women onto narratives of survival typically reserved for male triumphs and tribulations. Critically, Mala’s refusal to communicate in ­human language emblematizes the glaring absence of a diegetic language specific to indenture’s “herstory” in both an Indo-­Caribbean and Ca­rib­bean literary imaginary and offers one way to perceive of Cliff’s ruination in indenture terms. The villa­gers’ perception of Mala as a mute and deranged simpleton amplifies the social currency of this gendered ste­reo­type, even within the Indo-­Caribbean community, but they have of course misread her use of isolation and secrecy to enact her own revenge against Chandin. All along, the cultivated wild abundance of her garden and the social isolation she has invited upon herself have been essential to protecting a secret. Despite the villa­gers’ assumption that Mala is alone and bereft of any purpose, she has been living in amicable unity with birds, insects, and animals within full cycles of life, decay, and regeneration. Far from being completely alone, Mala’s queendom is filled with an “aroma reversing decay [. . .] rejuvenating the air for days” (115). Through long and lonely de­cades, gnarly roots, creeping vines, fruit trees, and insect kingdoms have successfully kept the villa­gers out while transforming her garden into a jungle sanctuary for threatened species of birds who have become her companions. As we also find out, in the long years of her self-­isolation Mala has been regularly inflicting self-­harm with a homemade ­recipe of chili paste and lime. E ­ very day at sunset, just before the onslaught of painful memories, she gouges on the vegetal meat u ­ ntil the “flesh had come undone . . . ​­every tingling blister and eruption in her mouth and lips [and]

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grotesquely enlarged tongue . . . ​a welcome sign that she had survived. She was alive” (233). Mala’s deliberate destruction to her tongue, which subsequently renders her “speechless” to all except Tyler, is a physical manifestation of her appropriation of silence to covet a secret that literally refuses to die. Mala’s silence renders her a deranged criminal in the eyes of her community; a young girl choosing to cohabit with her rapist becomes in island lore an ogre “madder than a naked chicken at midnight” who feeds on young c­ hildren (207). But, in fact, her isolation and self-­silencing has allowed her the freedom to manage and control the slow decomposition of her f­ ather’s dead body in the sewing room. Formerly the private meeting place for Sarah and Lavinia’s trysts, the room has since been shielded ­behind a formidable network of overturned furniture, “armchairs, rockers, side ­tables, dining ­table and high-­back chairs,” Mala has created to hide the vault in which her ­father’s body is hidden ­behind a “writhing carpet of moths, centipedes, millipedes, cockroaches and unnamed insects” (226). The description of moths forming over Chandin’s corpse as “wings . . . ​ locked together . . . ​to form a heavy sheet that was slowly devouring the corpse under­neath” is a striking example of Mootoo’s use of an indenture motif, the “ohrni,” to characterize Mala’s gendered re­sis­tance. The gossamer “ohrni” or “chador”—­the cloth that is the “instrument of the isolation” of the Indian ­woman—­not only hid the ­woman from the “other,” but also from “her mate” and “[i]ts fragile quality suggests a power­ful meta­phor for the weight of the binding customs and rituals to which Indians have been habituated for centuries, and which still play such a decisive role in their behaviour.”33 By enclosing and isolating the object of patricide in a gossamer “cloth” of moth bodies, Mala’s subversion operates within the constraints imposed on her by a society that has completely abandoned her. In that isolation, however, the instrument of her relentless traumatization, Chandin, has lain, unbeknownst to anyone, ­under the burden of an organic “cloth” created with the help of Mala’s insect companions, his “[d]eath feeding life” in dif­fer­ent form (226). As we see in Cereus, the suffering of Mala has its roots in her parents’ own childhood and their cultural indoctrination by the Presbyterian missionary. Their immersion into this new cultural order psychologically destroys the f­ ather and imposes a double bind on the ­mother, Sarah Ramchandin, whose newfound freedoms cost her a place in both ­family and nation. The consequences of the ­mother’s in­de­pen­dence from and rejection of two opposing patriarchal powers—­ Chris­tian­ity and Indian domesticity—­are pronounced by her absolute erasure from the novel and, by extension, her condemnation to a childless and citizenless aporia. Sarah, like Chandin, is chosen by Reverend Thoroughly to lead o ­ thers from the Indian community to conversion, but her immersion into the Mission’s world arouses conflicting feelings in Chandin. The Mission is also where she and Lavinia meet and begin a romance that ­w ill eventually allow Chandin to force Sarah into choosing between personal freedom and motherhood. More ironi-

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cally, though he finds it “appalling” for an educated man like himself to have a wife who refuses to speak proper En­glish, he at the same time “admired t­ hings in Lavinia that he would have been ashamed to have his wife do” (96, 100). The double-­binds imposed on Sarah highlight the continued stigmatization of “untameable” w ­ omen as abandoners, ­whether of nation or kin, whose reentry is impossible once judged for having crossed or transgressed social norms and expectations. During indenture, any form of autonomy or empowerment that ­women may have gained through ­either cultural creolization and/or physical expatriation became characterized as an excess and threat to the ways in which the idea of Indianness was strategically l­ imited and managed by a predominantly Brahmanical cultural patriarchy both in India and the Ca­rib­bean. In the colonial Indian narrative, b ­ ecause only morally degenerate and unwanted ­women w ­ ere thought to opt for indenture migration, the common assumption was that such ­women, viewed as already-­contaminated subjects, became, ­after their crossing, permanently removed from the motherland with their reentry nearly impossible. The prohibition against overseas travel was weighted heavier on indenture ­women, and, not ironically, their exposure to foreign places and p ­ eople perceived as evidence of their irreversible cultural contamination. Indeed, her absolute social death, that is, her complete othering from the Indian imaginary, was critical to the homeland’s projection of an ­imagined (and chauvinist) cultural purity. Even with the possibility of a return passage (to India), more ­women than men sought relocation and remigration across the kala pani to other colonies “­whether due to coercion again by recruiters, or due to spouse abandonment, or, as was often the case, a failure to be reincluded into their native village due to the time spent overseas.”34 As we see in Totaram Sanadhya’s anti-­indenture narrative, despite growing awareness of the exploitation of ­women on indenture plantations, this did not lead to initiatives advocating for their physical return to the homeland. A repatriated indenture ­woman was not ­imagined as an ­actual possibility, even though the discourse surrounding her victimization through the system became the ideological lynchpin that catapulted the anti-­indenture movement in India. Even on indenture plantations, the intersection of interests between colonial Eu­ro­pean and Indian men helped establish several mea­sures whereby the latter ­were granted l­ egal sanction to exercise greater control to curtail Indian w ­ omen’s freedoms in order to retrieve a “ruptured patriarchy from the ravages of indentureship” and to reinforce what they perceived to be traditional gender roles.35 The introduction of legislation to recognize Indian marriages (the Heathen Marriages Act 1860), for instance, compelled unmarried or widowed w ­ omen to relinquish their in­de­pen­dence and become a part of the patriarchal ­family system, with the risk of imprisonment if found guilty (by the accusing husband) of adultery or spousal abandonment. On the one hand, this Act helped men reassert control during a time in which they felt other­wise stripped of any power,

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but it also furthered the colonial ste­reo­type of in­de­pen­dent ­women during indenture as “runaways” of immoral character.36 Partha Chatterjee’s essay on Indian nationalism in the mid-­nineteenth ­century, a period that coincides with the first passages of indenture mi­grants, argues that the “­women’s question” was central to the style in which colonial India s­ haped a new nationalist, anti-­imperialist discourse. The rising hegemony of Brahmanical traditions in this effort sought to ­counter the infiltration of British colonial ideologies and to promote new ideas of what could and should constitute an “au­t hen­t ic” Indian tradition. In this rubric, the outside world and the West ­were associated with contamination, corruption, and “tantamount to annihilation of one’s very identity,” whereas the East and the inner home ­were equivalent to a “superior, spiritual culture.”37 As Chatterjee notes, this era’s patriarchal construct of citizenship was a marked departure from “the patriarchy of indigenous tradition,” and the “new ­woman” (in India) was in real­ity the “reverse of the “common” ­woman, who was coarse, vulgar, loud, quarrelsome, devoid of superior moral sense, sexually promiscuous, subjected to brutal physical oppression by males [. . .] It was precisely this degenerate condition of ­women which nationalism claimed it would reform.”38 Such reformations also came at the cost of disavowing the modernity and cosmopolitanism of the diasporic indenture ­woman, in par­tic­u ­lar, who was “shaping her own relationship with the “West” in a distant land,” and “[t]he manifest immorality and depravity of the indentured w ­ oman . . . ​served to reveal more clearly the contrasting image of the virtuous and chaste Indian w ­ oman at home.”39 If the ideal Indian w ­ oman of this period was presented on the mainland as the embodiment of an essentially incorruptible traditional “East,” by extension it would follow that the indenture ­woman abroad embodied the evils of the modern “West” b ­ ecause of her participation in a system “that was said to be turning Indian ­women into prostitutes.” 40 The enigmatic tension between personal freedom and social excommunication is thus central to any gendered discussion of indenture w ­ omen’s experience of migration and exile, in which the “open[ing] up of dif­fer­ent possibilities, even of self-­representation”  41 came with excommunication from the homeland and their double exploitation (by both Eu­ro­pean and Indian patriarchy) on the plantations. Only by “(en)gendering indenture,” as Reddock suggests, can we begin to challenge “most con­temporary research on w ­ omen’s history” in the Ca­rib­ bean that has recycled rather than criticized long-­held colonialist myths “about the character of immigrant Indian ­women [and] that the Indian ­women who migrated did so ­under the power, authority and control of their male relatives and ­were of docile and tractable character.” 42 Engendering indenture studies is moreover necessary in order to fi­nally begin uncovering the complex ways indenture w ­ omen ­were able to thrive in and manipulate a system that other­w ise victimized Indian w ­ omen and committed them to absolute exile from India, and which used the unequal gender quota to constantly negotiate the interests and

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benefits of ­either Indian men or Eu­ro­pean planters, eventually leading “to the curtailment of the social and economic autonomy which numerous Indian ­women had sought to achieve in the new society.” 43 In the case of indenture ­women especially, as Marina Car­ter has noted, Hugh Tinker’s repre­sen­ta­tion of them as “single, broken creatures” situated indenture ­women in a moral binary that sought to depict the w ­ omen as “­either ‘liberated’ or ‘coerced’ into leading sexually abandoned or non-­conformist lives.” 44 The prolonged systemic abuse of indenture w ­ omen within several overlapping cultural contexts, the Indian, Eu­ro­pean, and Creole Ca­rib­bean, has rarely been depicted in Ca­r ib­bean fiction, even by Indo-­Caribbean writers. Despite this, however, literary configurations of Indian rural w ­ omen have often been employed in fiction, even if in ways that did not elucidate details of indenture’s herstories. In canonized lit­er­a­ture of the Ca­rib­bean, such as Olive Se­nior’s much anthologized short story, “Arrival of the Snake ­Woman” (1989), the Indian ­woman functions as a motif that drives the story’s critique of the arrival of a neocolonizing cap­i­tal­ist world order without adequate probing into the psy­chol­ ogy of the Indian w ­ oman’s experience as a product of indenture. Set in the late-­nineteenth c­ entury, the story depicts the transformation of Jamaica’s rural countryside with the advent of Christian missionaries and petty capitalism. The title alludes to the pejorative phrase used to refer to the sari (an Indian w ­ oman’s garment) and its resemblance to a snake, but was also meant as a direct criticism of the Indian community’s refusal to creolize or “dress” according to the social norm. The “snake w ­ oman” of the title thus invokes the arrival of bad times embodied in an Indian w ­ oman simply called “Miss Coolie” as perceived from the viewpoint of a non-­Indian community reeling against the entry of a figure depicted as threatening, ominous, and neocolonizing. In this sense, the titular Miss Coolie serves as a metonym for change that is undesirable but ultimately unavoidable. We see this in the child narrator’s comments that so much gossip and talk surrounded who or what the “snake w ­ oman” exactly is that her arrival becomes “even more frightening to me than if she had been half-­snake, half-­ woman which is what I had first ­imagined, for all of us ­under Parson Bedlow’s sway believed that to be a Heathen was the very worst t­ hing.” 45 Indeed, Chris­ tian­ity functions in the story to showcase her (always presumed) complicity with new-­world ­orders creeping into the village and from which she benefits to become the richest person in the community. The dire ramifications of Western colonialism are thus recentered to lay emphasis on Miss Coolie’s threat and away from the proselytism of the Church and its colonial mission. Se­nior’s “Miss Coolie,” while indeed presenting a reductive rendering of Indo-­ Caribbean womanhood,46 is more overtly an example of the unproblematic way in which neo­co­lo­nial­ist paradigms are deemed an acceptable norm by which to ­either characterize or read the creolizing practices of Indians as duplicitous and superficial, especially of Indian w ­ omen who, as has been suggested, had the most

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to gain through creolizing in order to forge their own sense of belongingness in a new environment. This, as ­will be discussed in the Conclusion, connects to the problematic ways in which the “arrival” of indentured persons has been negotiated by o ­ thers in rigid binaries, that is, as e­ ither good or bad for colonial economy, temporary or permanent to the region, and so on. As we learn, Miss Coolie’s conversion in real­ity has been only an act (as a Christian her son can now attend the missionary school, though she secretly continues to practice Hinduism at home). Such indications of her shape-­shifting and slippery character affirm the superiority of the “old” community (represented as “African” and spiritual) that ­will be destroyed by the “new” colonial order (ushered in by her arrival). Framing her creolization as an economic and self-­serving transaction moreover demonstrates through direct contrast the threatened cultural life of the always-­already (Black) creolized community represented by the child narrator. Her creolization is thus successfully devalued when placed in opposition to what eventually surfaces as the real prob­lem: the conservation of African heritages and their f­ uture survival in a Ca­rib­bean rapidly changing with the “arrival” of Indians.47 As Cereus outlines, the cultural creolization of post-­indenture Indo-­Caribbean ­women is a form of transgressive “crossing” concomitant with their social censure and othering, and their efforts to reinvent or reproduce the contours of their own freedom and agency was as much a taboo as the prohibition against kala pani crossing for indenture ­women. Chandin’s immersion into a Christianized world effectively leads to his rejection of his Indian roots. His own community never fully accepts him, but nor do they fully stop praising and respecting him even a­ fter his abuse becomes common knowledge. Yet, for Sarah, the only other Indian from the barracks and who is also the only other girl in the seminary besides Lavinia, what freedoms are procured from leaving the Indian world and falling in love with Lavinia ultimately compel her to abandon her ­daughters and flee from Lantanacamara. In the same way that Cliff suggests reading into Antoinette Cosway’s name (“causeway”) as symbolic of Jean Rhys’ “re-­locating” and “re-­identifying” a Ca­rib­bean ­woman’s perspective “from the inside,” one can similarly read into Mala’s name and her role in Cereus’s insider’s rendering of indenture trauma and its aftermath. True to her name, which means a “chain” or “garland,” 48 Mala lies at the epicenter of Mootoo’s feminist critique of the colonialist and heteropatriarchal paradigms all her “queer” Indo-­Caribbean characters (Mala, Tyler, Otoh, Ambrose, Sarah, Lavinia, and even Chandin) are forced to navigate in search of their freedom, safety, and survival. Fascinated from childhood by the agility and strength of spider silk, Mala is enthralled with Ambrose’s plans to harvest it for h ­ uman protection. “Imagine!” Ambrose tells Mala, “a finely woven curtain miles high in the sky, hung between the Ca­rib­ bean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean [that] could contain and halt a hurricane!” (365). But Mala, who has lost loved ones to oceanic migrations she herself ­will never experience, imagines a dif­fer­ent purpose: “A bridge,” she cries, “a bridge to cross

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[and] no ­matter how much ­people and animal and car they drive on it, it would never come falling down” (368–369). Her endless capacity for love and forgiveness for all ­those who have abandoned her thus functions as a “bridge” that she cultivates as a lifeline for her absent m ­ other and s­ ister who had no choice but to leave. And, even despite Mala’s traumatization and betrayal by Chandin, the decoding of her silence is what ultimately provides a view “from the inside” into his own troubled imbrication into the Church. Cereus thus offers a power­ful commentary on both Indian men and ­women’s negotiation of belongingness through forms of cultural “passing” and “crossing” inseparable from sacrifice and loss.

“Rice Presbyterian” Mootoo’s gender-­i nclusive rendering of (post)indenture cultural history links Mala’s oppression by her ­father with the hidden and often-­neglected colonial heteropatriarchal pressures experienced by Indian men whose social success and fortune become inextricably linked to a Christianized, Eurocentric world order. In this, the novel is perhaps the earliest Indo-­Caribbean work to depict religious colonization as a specifically gendered form of historical trauma and includes the psychic trauma of men forced to reject and abandon their Indianness. While typically Indian men’s cultural creolization was promoted as productive and rewarding for the community, Mootoo interrupts this colonialist heteropatriarchal narrative by connecting the trauma of ­father and ­daughter. The novel’s nonlinear narrative structure in fact amplifies the interconnectedness of their stories, since Tyler cannot hope to cure Mala without uncovering the source of her breakdown in Chandin’s own pathology a­ fter his induction into the Presbyterian Mission. Chris­tian­ity (or conversion to Chris­tian­ity) was often promoted as the “medium of education and advancement” for the Indian community and has historically been presented as a promoter of the productive cultural creolization of Indian communities.49 In Cereus, however, religious conversion is a major source of intracultural rupturing and intergenerational trauma. By offering us Chandin’s views and inner psy­chol­ogy, Mootoo humanizes the figure of the Christian Indian—­t he so-­called “rice Presbyterian” or rural convert—­a nd depicts conversion as an added colonial axis in which Chris­t ian­ity becomes the only form of cultural creolization available to Indians, that is to say, a culturally hybrid identity acceptable and successful insofar as it demonstrated sameness with the greater sociocultural mainstream. The Christian convert, and in par­tic­u ­lar the Indian Christian proselytizer (like Chandin) who sought to bring more Hindu and Muslim Indians into the flock, was often an object of ridicule—­“[t]hose Christian Indians who became socially prominent aroused a mixture of pride and envy, pity and contempt for ‘abandoning’ their own culture” and “ridicu­ lous for their desperate attempts at material self-­interest through conversion.”50

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Though the culturally creolized Christianized Indian may have been the only and “first East Indian to enter the larger area of public activity,” they w ­ ere also perceived within their own community by the derogative “rice Presbyterian,” a cultural defector who was often effectively “excommunicated.”51 Conversion may have offered Indian men, especially, unpre­ce­dented access to social and po­liti­ cal powers previously withheld from them, but this entry, as Mootoo’s novel shows, came with severely ­limited benefits producing long-­lasting forms of disruption within the Indian community. In the early de­cades of the twentieth c­ entury, rural Indo-­Caribbean populations, such as ­those in Chandin’s childhood village, ­were afforded ­little to no ave­ nues for a better life u ­ ntil the arrival of the Canadian Presbyterian Mission. The colonial presumption that rural (mostly male) Indians could and should enter the greater social fabric via their indoctrination by Christian missions was also true for Indian w ­ omen, but their full immersion into this new world of freedoms, as in Sarah’s case, bars them from reentry into and/or ac­cep­tance by their own communities. What needs mentioning in studies that attend to the historical role of education and colonial proselytization of Indians is that girls and ­women received almost no access to the benefits given to Indian men, largely due to the community’s own disparaging views on female education, u ­ ntil the establishment of The Naparima Girls’ high school in 1912.52 Even ­after educational opportunities for Indians w ­ ere started by Presbyterian missionaries in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, ­these ­were often withheld from ­women and procured only through considerable sacrifice and initiative on their part despite the fact that the first attempts to introduce Indian girls to education was through the “imposition of Western Eu­ro­pean middle-­class h ­ ouse­w ife ideology . . . ​to create the prototype of the submissive, subordinate, docile Indian ­house­wife.”53 Historically, the (Presbyterian) Church and its affiliated organ­ izations ­were the only organ­izations to offer minority (Indian) ­women outlets for social ave­nues censored by their own community even though the Church’s missions introduced indelible rifts to the community’s cultural ethos. For ­women in par­tic­u­lar, as Mohammed argues, feminism in the Ca­rib­bean region had to develop through both covert and overt forms of activism b ­ ecause w ­ omen had to maintain the very status quo they sought to challenge and w ­ ere forced to uphold traditional cultural values and practices even as they sought to “abandon” them for their own empowerment. For instance, despite the fact that out­ spoken ­women in some cases resisted the domestication of w ­ omen’s ­labor, ­running day care and nursing facilities often served as the only available outlets for social activism. Though t­ hese early feminist practices w ­ ere clearly evidence of w ­ omen’s courage and bravery, their actions nevertheless had to appear as “respectable.”54 For Indian men, on the other hand, cultural creolization was predominantly perceived as a necessity and asset both for the individual and the

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community-­at-­large and seldom viewed as a threat to purportedly “au­t hen­tic” constructs of Indianness. From the moment that Reverend Thoroughly’s buggy tears down the dusty road leading to Chandin’s home in the barracks, the latter’s name was already shared among all “immigrant workers . . . ​across the width and breadth of Lantanacamara. Everywhere . . . ​Chandin’s bright and prosperous f­ uture w ­ ere discussed and debated.” As this news “spread . . . ​he was unwittingly helping to convert Indians to Chris­t ian­ity” (53–54, 56). As one anonymous villa­ger proclaims, “[s]ince Africans let go from slavery,” they have been given schools, jobs, medical assistance, and other forms of government support, but Indians had not even a school for their c­ hildren and ­were forced to look “­after our own self, ­because nobody have time for us. Except the Reverend . . . ​A ll he want from us is that we convert [and] when you praying you pray with you eyes and you mouth shut. ­Simple so. That is all” (55–56). Chandin’s ­father willingly sends his son into the Mission hoping to reverse the “karmic destiny” of servitude borne out in his own life as an indenture: [He] thought about life in the barracks, and life in India before his recruitment to Lantanacamara. Th ­ ere was no difference. But by making the long journey across two oceans, he had hoped to leave b ­ ehind . . . ​his karmic destiny as a servant labourer—if not for himself, at least for his son who had been born just before they left India. In Lantanacamara it was easier to slip out of caste. He planned to work hard, save money and educate Chandin out of the fields. (52)

But, by deciding on his son’s education-­t hrough-­conversion, he inadvertently severs his son from ­family and community. As we see in Chandin’s case, adoption into the Thoroughly Mission and ­house­hold leave him psychologically damaged and ultimately unable to mend his broken relationship with his village and parents, and his own ­daughters suffer the consequences. Chandin’s early years reveal that, indeed, nothing was “­simple so” about the coercive cultural creolization of (rural) Indians. Learning how to imitate the mannerisms and verbal phrases of the White seminarians only increases his sense that he w ­ ill never ­really belong to this new ­family, and he is unable to discern ­whether the other seminarians like him as a person or for his accidental birth as one of the “race that it was their mission to Christianize” (72). From his time living in the Reverend’s h ­ ouse­hold, what Chandin learns is to feel shame for his parents’ obvious loyalty to Hinduism, which he reads as a personal betrayal, and to pray that the orderly cleanliness of the Mission w ­ ill rid him of the stigma of rural Indian poverty. He begins to despise the smell of “coals and charred eggplant and . . . ​ sweat” emanating from his ­mother’s skin and breath, and he rankles against the odor of “camphor and incense” pervading the air of his parents’ ­house, their hair, and clothes. The crucifix given to his parents by the Reverend lies wrapped in a

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trunk, while statues of Hindu gods are everywhere vis­i­ble. He soon stops g­ oing back to his village altogether and never sees his f­ ather again. He sees his m ­ other only ­because she visits the church e­ very Sunday to get a glimpse of her sad-­ looking son “looking very foreign in spite of his dark skin, all dressed up in his jacket and tie, right next to the Reverend’s wife” (56). Chandin’s revulsion for the rural lifestyle of his upbringing in the barracks—­ the endless cane fields, mud huts, peerahs (low wooden stools), enamel utensils, cattiyas (jute-­stringed bed), out­houses with Indian-­style toilets—is near complete when he begins fixating on the shining “glass pendants” of the Thoroughly’s chandelier and aspires to become the “first brown-­skinned person in Lantanacamara to own one” (60). His fascination for the bright pendants soon transforms into an obsession for the tall, lithe, and golden-­haired Lavinia Thoroughly, the Reverend’s ­daughter. Noting the exceptional closeness between Lavinia and Sarah, he persists with his infatuation and convinces himself that Lavinia may eventually desire friendship, and more, with him. Unable to arouse any interest from Lavinia, however, Chandin falls into a pattern of crippling self-­ loathing, hating “his looks, the colour of his skin, the texture of his hair, his accent, the barracks, his real parents,” and, eventually, “even the Reverend and his god” (63). Chandin is soon reprimanded by the Reverend for his impropriety in desiring a ­woman who is technically, if not biologically, his sibling, and is ­later enraged to discover that Lavinia has been betrothed to another White man from the Shivering Northern Wetlands, a first cousin who is both technically and biologically an immediate blood relative. Though they have never exchanged words or even shared any close encounters, Chandin hastily marries Sarah in order to “collapse in the security of a ­woman, a ­woman from his background” (83). It is only ­after years into his marriage, ­after the birth of his two ­daughters, that Chandin fi­nally begins to feel the strain of having become “chained to both the church and the Thoroughlys, and impotent to reverse the path his life had taken since the day the Reverend made that trip to his parents’ quarters” (89). For Hindu and Muslim Indians across the Ca­rib­bean, conversion to Chris­ tian­ity has historically been one of the ways the community has proactively ensured their assimilation into the Ca­rib­bean mainstream.55 It was additionally one manner of sociocultural creolization by which Indians ­were able to outwardly demonstrate their successful assimilation (that is, their “arrival”) through dress, name changes, religious rituals, and language acquisition that was in tune with, rather than separate from, the African majority. Si­mul­ta­neously, relinquishing the religion of heritage signaled an internal division between Indians and posed a threat to the community’s efforts to retain and maintain their cultural worldviews. Thus, while conversion provided the Indian community with some agency, it also produced an internal fracturing of relations within the Indian community as a ­whole, and the infiltration of Chris­tian­ity’s Eurocentric

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epistemologies led to a rise of more orthodox forms of Hinduism and Islam despite the fact that t­ hese had significantly transformed through migration and cultural pollination. As Brinsley Samaroo suggests, (Hindu and Muslim) Indians have long felt the need to control their cultural identity and practices on their own terms in order to countermand the neocolonizing agendas of government-­ sanctioned initiatives such as the Canadian Presbyterian CMIs, or, Canadian Mission to the Indians. Canada, seldom viewed as imperial, was in fact host to the cultural colonization of indenture populations in the Ca­rib­bean at the turn of the twentieth c­ entury and becomes by the 1990s, when Mootoo writes, home to the largest number of diasporic Indo-­Caribbeans. As early as the 1930s, the Hindu community in Trinidad resisted such efforts by seeking out Hindu missionaries from India who “could stem the tide of aggressive Christian missionary work among Indo-­Caribbean ­peoples.56 Even up to the 1970s, Eric William’s po­liti­cal initiatives to promote national unity not only “caused considerable resentment among Black youths who reacted vigorously in Black Power protests” but Indian communities as well “reacted with an increased assertion of Indianism” against the nationalist rhe­toric of unity (136). Broadly speaking, in the nineteenth c­ entury West Indies, the educational system was an instrument used to maintain the colonial sociopo­liti­cal worldview. Even in the period following emancipation, education did not serve as a vehicle by which former slaves could capitalize on their newfound freedom, but more so remained a colonialist tool that helped ensure empire’s continuing po­liti­cal reign in the region. Ethnic differences and tensions w ­ ere both maintained and aggravated by a climate in which dif­fer­ent groups competed against each other for very l­ imited ave­nues of success and achievement. As Bacchus suggests, the idea of the white man was to maintain the status quo, at least for another generation. The idea of the coloured man was pro­gress,—­political and social,—­ provided such pro­gress was not extended to t­ hose of darker skins than himself. The idea of the black man was to catch up with the coloureds for a start. The coolie, [East Indians] at this stage, had no ideas other than survival.57

The stratification of education in this way not only ensured the complete segregation between ethnic groups by forcing them to compete in a colonialist endgame but also created the illusion that the paucity of educational opportunities offered to Indians was a utilitarian decision and not connected to a larger design at segregation. U ­ ntil the 1950s, Samaroo argues, “government assistance was not given to East Indian organ­izations that w ­ ere desirous of managing their own schools. Hence Canadian mission schools aided by government and planters represented the only ray of hope for the East Indian who wished to rise above the level of plantation” and in 1871, the first government-­sponsored primary school for Indians run by the Canadian missionaries was opened.58 On their end, Indians as

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well initially refused to send their ­children to schools, ­until “it became obvious that they ­were likely to remain in ­t hese colonies, rather than return to India on the termination of their indentureship.”59 The expectation that the majority would return to India meant that, at first, ­there w ­ ere no attempts made to offer them education, and when t­ hese w ­ ere made, the “education was often aimed at deculturalizing and Christianizing the East Indians who w ­ ere mainly Hindus and Muslims” 60 Though Christianization has often been seen as a milestone in providing Indians the first ever tool for their entry into the West Indian society, thereby guaranteeing them skills and resources necessary to thrive and prosper in their ­adopted home, t­ hese schools ­were in actuality set up to introduce Indians to “Western cultural traditions and the En­glish language” and “the cultural heritage of the East Indians . . . ​was often officially denounced and not given any recognition in schools. Instead, the education of ­t hese ­children was to be an act of Christianization which would cause them to forget their own cultural and religious roots.” 61 The other real­ity of course is that the missionaries supported the planters and merchants as much as the latter supported the former, and that “the Mission appears to have been motivated primarily by [the] desire to maintain the East Indians as a docile and tractable ­labour force learning the virtues of obedience and humility.” 62 Chandin’s transformation into the prototypically violent and abusive patriarch reveals the close and troubling relationship between the Presbyterian church and its role in the gradual modernization and assimilation of a mostly rural post-­ indenture population who ­were made to see the learning of En­glish and Chris­ tian­ity as their only means of survival in and entry into the social superstructure. The detailed scenes of the growing “­silent space” in Chandin’s head (63) give substance to the interiorized and internalized pathology that exposes what Poynting defines as the “experience of cultural colonisation” that came through Indians’ “contact with the Christian world-­ view through missionary proselytization, which destroyed the ­wholeness of the Hindu world and the psychic integrity of the individuals within it.” 63 Despite the fact that Christian mission schools and conversion to Chris­tian­ity did come with definitive advantages for Indians, especially during indenture and the early twentieth ­century, the fact that very few Indians are Christians in the con­temporary period signals, as Poynting argues, the lingering epistemic and psychological vio­lence of Indian cultural colonization through religious conversion. Indo-­Caribbean views on this demonstrate the “results of the contact . . . ​as deeply destructive,” as we see in Chandin’s complete internalization of the Mission’s colonialist anti-­Indian narrative.64

Exile as Beloved Ultimately, Cereus Bloom provides that the very contradictions concomitant with creolization—in the novel seen as a pro­cess in which passages and crossings must

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be taken—­necessitate that both exile and the exiled be viewed as beloved. Often noted in criticisms on Mootoo’s writings is that exile and expatriation have been instrumental to her own accomplishments as the Ca­rib­be­an’s first openly queer feminist writer. Rosanne Kanhai, for instance, offers that it is precisely Mootoo’s habitation in Vancouver that gives her an objective distance with which to explore and “expos[e] the well-­kept ­family secrets of rape, incest and other forms of ­family vio­lence within Indo-­Caribbean communities [that have] tormented this community since the early days of indentureship.” 65 O’Callaghan, in turn, argues that while most exile writers in the “more tolerant world of the metropole” appropriate lesbianism as a feminist discourse of re­sis­tance in which homo­sexuality is “naturalized” and heterosexuality rarely problematized, Mootoo’s specific focus on “[a] cceptance” in Cereus highlights the “lack of ac­cep­tance in the West Indies, the silencing, prohibiting and censuring of lesbian experience.” 66 Mootoo is herself not insensitive to the ways in which living abroad as a minority writer has influenced academic reception of her work. In an interview on the release of her novel He Drown She in the Sea (in 2005), Mootoo is asked if her diasporic upbringing—­ birth in Ireland, adolescence in Trinidad, and migration to Vancouver—is part of an agenda in her fictive reinventions of the Ca­rib­bean. Mootoo is openly complimented by the question, answering that “[u]sually p ­ eople assume I am penetrating Canada” in her writing (even about the Ca­rib­bean) since her migration to North Amer­i­ca.67 Similar apprehensions about tokenization surface in a poem-­letter to Richard Fung, a Canadian resident Chinese-­Trinidadian filmmaker, in which Mootoo confesses to acts of self-­exoticization, in par­tic­u­lar of her Trinidadianness and Indianness, as a way “to respond positively to the assumption that the South Asian ­woman, and in par­tic­u­lar, lesbian, is my true audience.” 68 Mootoo’s candid remarks on her (self)appropriation both for and by the literary market reveal her openness to audience-­reception, even as it exposes the spurious underside of having cachet as an openly queer minority diasporic artist. Mootoo has also always readily acknowledged that exile has lent her a form of protection from the physical vio­lence that accompanies homophobia in the Ca­rib­bean, especially ­toward lesbians. In par­tic­u­lar, she claims, distance provides “safety for the one who is speaking out,” even if her “outsider status” in both the Ca­rib­bean and Canada “feeds into the scandal about the person who leaves and never returns.” 69 Having to change “­mothers” early in her childhood, growing up with her grand­mother and then “returned” to a ­family who “­were strangers,” was, she says, “the beginning of a pattern of lifelong contradictions relating to the insider/outsider status.”70 Citing an outsider status as invaluable to her self-­identification as a writer, and to the writing pro­cess itself, Mootoo views the sacrifice that comes with “outsiderness” [as] a vantage point” to speak and write about “conclusions—­without end.”71 While Mootoo ­here points to the paradoxes of her own “insider/outsider” status as a diasporic writer, the “insider/outsider” status of the Indo-­Caribbean

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characters in Cereus is also impor­tant to the work’s ultimately redemptive portrayal of exile and cultural hybridization. Implicit to the novel’s subversion of passage as polluting is its pre­sen­ta­tion of “queerness” as essential to a healing pro­cess that can ultimately produce a more just community. Forms of inter­ cultural “crossings” once characterized by one’s own community as social betrayal, as in the case of male characters forced to opt in for the material benefits that came with conversion to Chris­tian­ity, are shown in Cereus to have positive potential in the post-­indenture period. Even forms of inter-­sexual “crossings,” as in Otoh’s seamless and magical transformation from a female into male, make pos­si­ble a reimagining of romance, courtship, and ­family. Tyler, once forced to leave due to homophobia, returns to Lantanacamara as a professional healer; Ambrose rejects his religious scholarship in Christian prosyletization and chooses entomology to start his own business harvesting spider silk, a lifelong fascination he accredits to Mala’s introduction of the insect world to him in their childhood. Ambrose, unlike Chandin, decides to break ­free from the crippling psychic world of the Mission ­after becoming increasingly uncomfortable with “the deeply embedded colonial arrogance” of the seminary’s teachings that “some of us are considered to be much lesser than o ­ thers—­especially if we are not Wetlandish or Eu­ro­pean or full-­ blooded white” (340). Tyler’s own return to Lantanacamara not only proves essential to Mala’s cure, since no one ­else ­will come near her, but, as he says, should be a cause for “celebrat[ion]” as he was the first “Lantanacamaran man ever to have trained in the profession of nursing” abroad and returned to the Ca­rib­bean to heal the el­derly (17). Tyler and Ambrose’s rejection of distinctive forms of violent heteropatriarchy, homophobia and religious conversion, respectively, complete Mootoo’s envisioning of an alternative post-­indenture destiny that can and does transcend the traumas of indenture cultural colonialism, in par­t ic­u ­lar for ­women and transgender groups who are most vulnerable. The romantic u ­ nions that come together in Paradise Alms determine the new post-­i ndenture Ca­r ib­bean as a haven for the once persecuted to return, moreover a Ca­rib­bean in which multiple differently “queer” identities lovingly and patiently await the return of insiders previously cast out as polluted social outsiders. “Not a day passes,” Tyler says, that Asha, Sarah, and Lavinia “are not foremost in our minds,” their arrival a “promise” as eagerly anticipated as that of the “cereus-­scented breeze on a Paradise night” (420–421). “Where are you all?” he asks and do they all “know that it is now safe to return to Paradise”? (159). The cereus cactus, whose etymology infers illumination, signals the Ca­rib­be­an’s importance as beacon and home, its flower blooming “at night” further suggestive of the exile’s return as imminent not foreclosed; how apt that Cereus is a­ fter all a letter written for Asha, whose name means “hope.” Against kala pani’s hegemonic paradigm, wherein exile is pollution and abandonment a mark of shame, Mootoo’s work foregrounds the importance of

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migration and even flight to a (post)indenture imaginary grounded in a poetics of healing and hope. Transgressions and crossings—be they physical, cultural, or ideological—­into new worlds are not polluting to ­either the individual or society but regenerative in the very building of a community that welcomes the erstwhile ostracized and alienated. The reunion of octogenarians Mala and Ambrose promises the renewal of an interrupted romance wholly outside the sociopo­liti­cal pressures of heterosexual reproduction, and the coming together of Otoh and Tyler promises a more just and hopeful ­f uture for ­t hose who live and love outside gender binarisms. The new f­ amily that fi­nally comes together at the end of the novel commits to waiting with love for the departed, who can now know that they are safe to return. As Otoh and Tyler walk arm in arm, the latter now comfortably wearing dresses in public, the gardener of Paradise Alms is moved to compassion and inspired to long for a reunion and homecoming of his own. While once having judged and ostracized his own gay ­brother, he now openly wishes that his absent sibling “could meet you two . . . ​[W]­here is he I won­der? Where my ­brother?” (419). As indenture’s ­daughter, to borrow from Cliff, Mala is the connective bridge that unites a vast range of “queer” subjects whose needs and desires cast into relief the dif­fer­ent forms of belonging that require a reimagining of refuge and love for t­ hose forced to leave. Cereus thus provides a power­ful counter-­narrative to kala pani’s hegemonic narratives of return and exile by reframing migration as a necessity that is also transformative and regenerative. New world spaces, both in the Ca­rib­bean and its diasporas, are in this way shifted to the very center of a (post)indenture poetics in which passage is no longer polluting or shameful, instead reframed as a portal promising hope and healing for ­those who must belong in multiple worlds si­mul­ta­neously.

Conclusion

The Enigma of Arrival Contrary to conventional scholarship, this book has aimed to outline an Indo-­Caribbean literary imaginary in thorough engagement with, rather than estrangement from, the regional and transnational poetics of the Ca­r ib­ bean canon so as to underscore symbolic bridges between cultural worlds conventionally set apart—­t he Africanized and Indianized—­and to distinguish between cultural worlds assumed to be the same—­indenture and South Asian Indianness. In my readings of novels in the individual chapters, I show that a “contradictory Indianness” is one that seizes and strategizes on a contrapuntal otherness—an Indianness that is post-­India and, by extension, a Ca­rib­be­ anness that is not only Eu­ro­pean or African, and more than South Asian. Contradictory Indianness has aimed in this way to trace the articulation of an emergent subaltern imaginary habitually excluded from the changing par­ ameters of “Ca­rib­bean.” In the writings of Totaram Sanadhya and LalBihari Sharma, what is clearly seen is an opening up of the category of “Indian” by the so-­called “casteless” indenture, and the radical emergence of a diasporic consciousness during the very period in which indenture migration was perceived of as abyss by the mainland. In rereading the debut novels of Ismith Khan, Harold Ladoo, and Shani Mootoo, I have endeavored to reilluminate indenture cultural worldviews thus far “written off” in most literary analyses of t­ hese pioneering texts. While some of ­t hese authors are now considered canonical in the anglophone Indo-­Caribbean literary canon, I offer new interpretations of t­ hese seminal works to demonstrate the importance a creolizing imaginary has had to literary works not typically associated with creolization’s radical vision. In par­tic­u­lar, I highlight the distinctive importance a creolizing literary imaginary has in the authors’ repre­sen­ta­tion of indenture passage and culture within a 156

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continuum that gradually unmoors from the ancestral framing of exile and the exiled as essentially polluted. This work’s unique contribution thus lies in its explicit privileging of contextualized close reading as a strategy that reveals the narrow conceptual frameworks habitually applied to Indo-­Caribbean works. ­These frameworks have not only perpetuated monolithic perceptions of Indian cultural identity in the Ca­rib­bean specifically but have more broadly continued to impose a fragmentary and disconnected study of (post)indenture aesthetics within indenture’s own transnational cartography. As newer works in this field emerge, it is ­imagined that a study of (post)indenture cultural evolutions within their own diasporic horizons—­which ­today includes Mauritius, the Fiji Islands, Suriname, Trinidad, Guyana, and South Africa—­will no longer seem aberrant if positioned outside of a binary relationship that has conventionally privileged mainland South Asian cultural constructs of Indianness. In this concluding chapter, I dwell on the complex ways in which the construct of “arrival” participates in a complex manner in even newer imaginaries of belonging and becoming in the Indo-­Caribbean and post-­indenture diasporic cultural contexts. On the one hand, as I go on to discuss, the discourse of “arrival” within the (post)indenture contexts is complicated by the fact that it may seem to celebrate the beginning, rather than the end, of the indenture system. On the other, as I argue, the idea of “arrival” is especially necessary to an Indo-­Caribbean and post-­indenture imaginary in which the myth of “return” predominates. In the Ca­rib­bean specifically, where almost ­every ethnic community can trace lineage to a history of forced migration and/or transplantation, the postponement of fixed meaning promised in becomingness instantiates Stuart Hall’s evocative framing of diasporic cultural expression and production as a “différance” wherein post-­arrival collective imaginaries are valued precisely as unpredictable and protean. This framework of cultural dynamism and reinvention has seldom been applied to the study of Indo-­Caribbean cultural evolution generally or of Indo-­Caribbean literary imaginaries in par­tic­u­lar. More specifically, while it has been conventionally accepted that diasporic cultural identities are born (that is, “arrive”) precisely out of the unexpectedly new and transgressive modes of reinvention necessitated by migration, it is also true that the generic framing of the “Indian diaspora” has not accepted all forms of Indianness. The ancestral and hegemonic myth of “return” has operated in a power­ful way to deny (post)indenture its own discourse of arrival and/or post-­arrival into its own “new worlds” locally and regionally such that “old worlds” persist. An indenture or post-­indenture Indo-­ Caribbean diasporic consciousness or poetics has rarely been explored as having historical and po­liti­cal integrity of its own, as if “(post)indenture” and “diaspora” are incompatible concepts ­unless anchored to ancestral constructs of the indenture person and indenture culture, and ­unless filtered through the lenses and discourses of South Asianist theories on colonial and postcolonial Indianness. The colonial contract’s guarantee of return appears to linger in the misconception that ­there is

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a conceptual “home” to which the study of (post)indenture cultural expression has to be “returned,” and its failure to “arrive” (or belong) in any one category continues its limbo-­like fate in academia. It is noteworthy that even very recent publications, such as We Mark Your Memory: Writing from the Descendants of Indenture (2018),1 recall the stigma of the indenture person as “temporary interloper” to characterize the “homelessness” of con­temporary post-­indenture critical inquiry and artistic creativity. In their introduction to the volume, the editors David Dabydeen, Maria del Pilar Kaladeen, and Tina Ramnarine argue that acts of re­sis­tance throughout the indenture system, while typically not associated with indenture populations, “took many forms, w ­ hether it was South Sea Islanders petitioning King VII [or] as a “non-­resistance” movement in Fiji, where workers without recourse to other forms of protest, took their own lives in alarming numbers.”2 This tradition of covert re­sis­tance continues most notably, they suggest, in literary works of indenture descendant writers who have “interrogate[d], in diverse genres, the legacies of indenture . . . ​by challeng[ing] colonial and indigenous narratives that rec­ord them as historical interlopers in countries to which they do not belong.”3 Re­sis­tance, according to Frank Birbalsingh, was not only once an integral “part and parcel of indentured Indian experience in the Ca­rib­bean” but a quality recuperated by post-­indenture Indian writers to mark the liminal spaces in which post-­indenture perspectives began to flourish and thrive.4 While this book has attempted to pre­sent the ways in which Indo-­Caribbean literary imaginaries have been subsumed u ­ nder other agendas, the elision of the “visionary message” of Indo-­Caribbean artistic expression, according to Patricia Mohammed, is even more deep-­seated and in need of redress. A “proj­ect on visual arts ­after indenture,” in Mohammed’s view, is impor­tant in order to fi­nally “disrupt the essentialist discourse of ‘arrival’ ” so as “to bring attention to the visual art practices of descendants of Indentures . . . ​w ithout engaging (and indeed while being critical of) Indian ethno-­nationalism.”5 Mohammed’s own short film, Coolie Pink and Green (2009),6 portrays the continued pressure Indo-­ Trinidadians, in par­tic­u ­lar the younger generations, feel in having to choose between “ancestral” constructs of being Indian and newly transformed hybrid identities. Narrated by two characters (an older man and younger girl) representing dif­fer­ent generations, the former derides any form of mixing and insists on ideals of purity, whereas the latter is enthralled by the “coolie colors” (pink and green) previously denigrated ­under colonialism as heathen and savage. Most importantly, as the myriad of Indo-­Trinidadian characters in this film show, ­t here is less of a binary pull between ancestral and modern as t­ here is a gradual and inevitable transmutation of Indian culture and cultural identity as newer generations search for their own meanings to love, ­family, and belongingness. In Coolie Pink and Green, this cultural evolution is embodied in the chutney ­music “playing all over the country” which the young w ­ oman embraces as her

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own. As she pronounces in the final scenes of the film, “why must I choose? [. . .] I is Trini. I Trini.” One clear instance of how constructs of arrival and belongingness and their intersection with colonialist legacies continue to be negotiated amongst Indo-­ Caribbean communities (both regionally and in their diasporas) and by o ­ thers is seen in the complications surrounding the meaning and significance of Indian Arrival Day.7 The annual cele­bration of the end of indenture in May, “Indian Arrival Day,” ostensibly announces the rupturing and uprooting of “India” onto the Ca­rib­bean since the first landing of the indentured in the Ca­rib­bean in 1847. In Trinidad, Indian Arrival Day was officially made into a national holiday in 1995, the same year that Basdeo Panday became the first Indian prime minister of in­de­pen­dent Trinidad and the 150-­year anniversary of indenture arrival. While the original proposition was to commemorate May 30, the “day of Indian arrival,” as “Indian Arrival Day,” this naming was initially rejected by the government and the holiday was renamed “Arrival Day” (it was re-­renamed Indian Arrival Day following Panday’s successful election). As some argued, the choice naming of this event as Indian Arrival Day, which took much rallying and petitioning to be made into a national state holiday,8 would focus specifically on the experience of Indian indenture l­abor and help showcase the long presence and contributions of Indians in the region. The omission of the word “Indian” from the occasion was therefore a glaring reminder of the Indian communities’ continued sociopo­liti­cal erasure and invisibility. As Basdeo Panday opined in the Trinidadian Guardian, “They could call it what they want; we all know it as the Indian Arrival Day. Why not call it just that? Why are you ashamed of the word Indian?”9 One dominant view held that t­ here was no need to mark the occasion as “Indian” due to the fact that Emancipation Day was to be seen as the cele­ bration for all p ­ eople. Yet, for o ­ thers, giving Indian arrival its own special designation has meant both the acknowledgement of Indian alterity and marginalization in the region as well as being one mea­sure of accepting that Indians are (equally) citizens of the nation. As Sita Bridgemohan notes, “I can tell the stories of African slavery—­learned from the history lessons of high school and university. I know nothing but the dates and numbers of Indian indentureship . . . ​[Indian Arrival Day] is the symbol which allows me to be Indian in a society that tells me that Carnival is my national culture.”10 Celebrating indenture not through its termination but as “Arrival” would moreover help refocus the perspective of the first Indian arrivants in the region for whom, in many cases, departure from India may have been desirable and embraced. To ­others, keeping the word “Indian” appropriated the colonialist narrative that indenture ­labor “saved” the islands from financial bankruptcy ­a fter the end of slavery. Indenture laborers, in this interpretation, are presented as instrumental to empire ­after emancipation made it illegal to enslave black ­people. Arrival, in ­these terms, pre­sents the laborer’s migration from India as empowering to empire’s mission,

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but at the same time ignores indenture’s imbrication in a plantocracy system that encouraged racial tensions between Africans and Asians while continuing the exploitation of both during colonialism and beyond. Though Indian Arrival Day garnered a tremendous sense of solidarity among Indians and served to commemorate their achievements in the region, it did nevertheless risk projecting a single, homogenous idea of Indianness and the experience of indenture as an equal one for all Indians regardless of religion, caste, gender, and so on. This projection of homogeneity, in turn, helped promote the idea of Trinidad as a culturally united and successfully acculturated i­ magined community, such that “Indian Arrival” came to serve “as a cipher for Indian integration.”11 Some thus argue that the cele­bration fails at many levels to broach the deferred “arrival,” that is to say, continued marginalization, Indo-­Caribbeans continue to face regionally even ­today. To this very point, Patricia Mohammed has argued that the emphasis on arrival continues to position Indians in Trinidad as a per­sis­tently immigrant population, as if a date of departure is still to be set. What would Trinidadian-­born Indians return to if they journeyed to India—­a memory, a dream, and a pilgrimage to ancestors? When do the mi­grants and ­children of mi­grants arrive at comprehending ­t here is a point of no return?12

Many, for such reasons, refuse to celebrate and honor indenture through Arrival Day cele­brations. Rajiv Mohabir, for one, explains that the use of “arrival” in this instance is a gross misrepre­sen­ta­tion that associates indenture with agency while erasing the “dispossession and terror [and] lingering effects of colonization haunting us [Indo-­Caribbeans] ­today.”13 Similarly for Andil Gosine, the “ ‘arrival’ focus . . . ​situates indenture descendants as perennially ‘outside’ Trinidad and Tobago” which furthermore registers post-­i ndenture communities “in conditions of trauma and bolsters long-­standing racial anx­i­eties between Indo-­and Afro-­Caribbean ­peoples in particular”—­indeed, arrival as the “primary framing” of Indian populations in the Ca­rib­bean “serves to conceal the facts of indentureship.”14 Still, for o ­ thers, even if Indian Arrival Day is seen to mark the day in which the community remembers the pitris (ancestors), its loudest promoters in the Ca­rib­bean have been religious organ­izations such as the Sanatan Dhar­ma Maha Sabha and the cele­brations increasingly appropriated to promote a unified global Hindu culture tied to mainland India, thereby misrepresenting India’s historical secular traditions and, even, the cultural diversity of the pitris. For ­women, in par­tic­u­lar, such purist versions of “Indian arrival” utterly erase from view the oppression of indenture and post-­indenture ­women on colonial plantation islands and the continued cultural policing of ­women’s rights ­under “the rise of global Hindutva factions in the Hindu diaspora”15 that comprise the Ca­rib­be­an’s “strongest link to the mainland.”16

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Selwyn Cudjoe’s Indian Time Ah Come in Trinidad and Tobago highlights the importance of “arrival” for Indo-­Caribbeans on the election of Kamla Persad-­ Bissessar as Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago (in January 2010).17 Persad-­ Bissessar’s entry into public office, Cudjoe writes, begins the pro­cess of “re-­assemblage” in a nation whose history has always included the “unenviable task of assembling its ethnic fragments into a harmonious ­whole. This is one of the challenges of the Kamla moment.”18 Indian Time is interspersed with dramatic visuals by Glenn Roopchand, whose artwork makes explicit connections between his “dougla”19 cultural ancestry and po­liti­cal vision, which Cudjoe specifically includes as emblematic of the “Kamla moment.” The collages selected for this book, superimpositions of Hindu goddesses, African queens, Orisha muses, and Rasta drummers, frame Cudjoe’s own urgent question: “Is it pos­si­ ble that ele­ments of Hinduism and Yoruba can come together in a new synthesis to serve/save the nation?”20 Cudjoe uses this impor­tant juncture in Trinidadian po­liti­cal history to suggest that the “Kamla moment” is one of “arrival” for the nation as a ­whole, even as it ­w ill test the overpowering narratives that have remained entrenched to constructs of Indian belonging and nonbelonging in the Ca­rib­bean. Cudjoe’s suggestion is especially noteworthy in its provision that the entry of an Indo-­Caribbean ­woman into the public and po­l iti­cal sphere is a moment in which national and con­temporary concerns with destiny and unity can also be envisioned. While Cudjoe points us to the need to view the “Kamla moment” as times to come for all of Trinidad and Tobago, what is equally urgent is the need to explore the “arrival” of previously unexplored and still to be uncovered (post)indenture worldviews amongst indenture-­ a ncestry writers and artists across the (post)indenture diaspora. Arrival can, in this sense, betoken the ushering in of worlds and worldviews arrivants ­were once collectively forbidden from exploring or even desiring collaboratively. This intervention is one of the main objectives of the Small Axe volume (2017) dedicated to critical interventions by con­temporary indenture-­a ncestry artists. Curated and edited by the Toronto-­based Indo-­ Trinidadian artist and academic Andil Gosine, “­Art After Indenture” seeks to address “questions about the commemoration of indentureship and calls for greater contention with its traumatic legacy” so as to interrupt a long tradition in which (post)indenture persons and their cultural histories have been e­ither absent and invisible or documented by ­others on their behalf. As Gosine notes, Ca­rib­bean artistic productions that do not align with its “Afro-­creole imaginations of the Ca­rib­bean are often excluded.” As recently as 2012, the only repre­ sen­ta­tion of indenture in the art exhibition Ca­rib­be­an: Crossworlds of the World was of a “nineteenth-­century photo­graph” of an unknown subject titled “Hindu Coolie W ­ oman of Trinidad.”21 Particularly as this event took place in New York, home to the largest population of Indo-­Caribbeans outside of the Ca­rib­bean, the

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use of a single archival document from over a c­ entury ago speaks to the continuing elision of (post)indenture worlds and their presence in the Ca­rib­bean and to the prevailing view that Indo-­Caribbean worlds remain indelibly locked in a static past. According to Gosine, (re)imagining indenture and its “aftermath” in con­temporary contexts is a critically impor­tant imperative so as to “affirm the complex humanity of indentureds and their descendants [and] their potential contribution to more universal questions about the h ­ uman condition.”22 “Art ­After Indenture” endeavors as such to “represent a full geography of indentureship” from South Africa to Guadeloupe as well as “twice-­diasporized mi­grants” in North Amer­i­ca and the United Kingdom. The main aim of the volume is to reveal the ways in which such artists address universal questions while firmly anchoring their vision, even if obliquely, in indenture cultural history. Trinidadian artist Wendy Nanan, the subject of Patricia Mohammed’s essay in this volume, and whom she identifies as the “first female Indian artist” to make a professional living, experiments with the kind of cultural synthesis also invoked by Cudjoe and which she calls necessary to creating “a new visual meta­phor for a society . . . ​derived from both Eu­ro­pean and Aryan roots.”23 This “reflexive iconoclasm,” according to Nanan, would challenge “mi­grants and postmigrants to celebrate arrivals rather than imaginary returns.”24 As Mohammed suggests, Nanan’s fusion of dif­fer­ent religious symbolisms centers on an indenture perspective that at the same time offers an alternative rendering of Trinidad’s broader transcultural modernity. In Nanan’s Baby Krishna series,25 for instance, the artist combines Hindu symbology with formal techniques associated with carnival mas (wire bending, papier mâché), use of found objects, and iconography from Trinidadian pop culture. Mohammed notes the multiple layers of cultural synchrony in one papier-­mâché Krishna. Holding an “enamel cup of tea and dou­ ere may represent to some “working class, poverty, and bles,”26 baby Krishna h social difference,” whereas for her (Mohammed) ­these same objects connote the “modest breakfast” indenture laborers would take in the late morning a­ fter working since dawn. “Doubles,” as Mohammed notes, is, despite its h ­ umble origins in indenture ­labor history, one of the most popu­lar food items of both Trinidad natives and tourists. In Nanan’s rendering of the image of Krishna, the religious icon is re­created and resignified from out of and within the context of indenture expressive culture as this has evolved regionally, locally, and beyond being a mere echo of e­ arlier significations. Especially as a “baby,” that is, as embryonic and visibly asexual, Nanan attempts to rebirth Krishna outside of any culturally homogenous contexts. Thus, Nanan’s reproduction of “East Indian iconography . . . ​ assimilated in the modern creolized Ca­rib­bean context” pre­sents that Krishna is not only Hindu, Indian, or godly but rather a cultural amalgam of distinctive and interconnected pan-­Caribbean ­human ele­ments.27 In another piece from Nanan’s exhibition Books and Stupas (2012)28 titled “Nelson Island,” also covered in Mohammed’s essay, the artist explic­itly consid-

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ers the issue of arrival by reimagining Ca­rib­bean history from a feminist Indo-­ Caribbean perspective. “Could an East Indian coolie immigrant, a w ­ oman,” Nanan asks, “ever have ­imagined, ­after the journey over the Kala Pani, sequestered on Nelson Island, that her descendant would one day be prime minister of t­ hese islands?”29 Nelson island, named ­after British naval officer Horatio Nelson, was the first point of disembarkation in Trinidad for indenture Indians and used specifically to quarantine them before their transportation to vari­ous estates. In Nanan’s art, an orhni-­clad indenture female on the left-­facing leaf of one book sits adjacent to Kamala Persad-­Bissessar on the right. Placing t­ hese two figures into contact, as it w ­ ere, Nanan outlines a history from one point of arrival in which the indenture ­woman was held captive before being distributed in new lands to a new and previously unimaginable point in the (post)indenture f­ uture in which an Indo-­Caribbean ­woman emerges as a public po­liti­cal figure. In par­ tic­u­lar, Nanan’s use of the book as a “mnemonic device” in this series “­w ill[s] the viewer and society to open the book further, to turn the pages, as it w ­ ere, rather than remain attached to an unchanging passage.”30 Nanan’s multimodal and transcultural art reimagines indenture history and culture into the foreground in order trace an Indo-­Caribbean poetics that w ­ ill, as the artist suggests, dislodge narratives “in which return to the native land or an i­ magined cultural purity once loomed large as a marker of identity.”31 The work of artist and academic Andil Gosine similarly traverses cultures and genres to “imagine indentureship” as a productive legacy, and specifically one in which “personal trauma” and the history of Trinidad are interlocked.32 According to Gosine, The prob­lems of domestic vio­lence and wife murder, alcoholism, high suicide rates . . . ​in Guyana and Trinidad and Tobago have long stories, and are wrapped up on both the systemic dehumanization of ­t hose who would be indentures, anx­i­eties about their bodies and ‘barbaric’ sexual and cultural practices, as well as in the post-­indenture effort to ‘belong’ again.33

From his own childhood, Gosine recalls the myriad capacities of the cutlass; used by the indentured in the cane fields, by his grand­mother to slice slender shards of sugarcane for his plea­sure, by his ­uncle to save him from a boa constrictor, and, fi­nally, in the murder of his great-­grandmother. The cutlass can thus be seen to enclose masculine-­defined spaces and the feminine in private moments of both tenderness and vio­lence. As a tool that connects slave and indenture ­labor, the cutlass is moreover a critical reminder (and remainder) of the intersectionality of Ca­rib­bean colonial po­liti­cal plantation histories. In his per­for­mance series WARDROBES,34 which includes a section on the cutlass, Gosine makes his own effort to trace the long arc of belonging in both the indenture and post-­indenture contexts. Juxtaposing the voyage of an indenture ­woman, “Savitri,” with that of a love-­sick “Jimmy” on the eve of his

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departure from Paris, Gosine asks us to imagine them meeting in 2017 on the centennial anniversary of the end of indenture. In combining Savitri’s departure from Calcutta to Trinidad in 1845 with Jimmy’s own departure from Paris in 2009, WARDROBES effectively imagines indenture not only as a period in the past but as an inheritance that garners newer iterations through time and place—­“one story of Indentureship and ­After and every­thing in-­between.”35 Gosine explains that the wanderlust of his own heartbreak—­from Trinidad to Canada, then from the United Kingdom to France, onward to the United States before returning to Canada and then to France again—­sent him “back to Savitri almost two centuries ago” as part of his own way of “looking for home,” and to the “experience of si­mul­ta­neously not belonging anywhere and potentially belonging everywhere that so many descendants of colonized subjects share.”36 When Savitri boards the Fateh Al Razack she is “ordered” to change out of traditional Indian clothes and into “stockings, woolen trousers, shoes, and a petticoat”; Jimmy departs from France towing “four suitcases of couture.” What connects the indenture ­woman and queer male in Gosine’s artistic imaginary thus pushes against obvious differences in their separate histories to dwell on the shared nature of their experiences with form and conformity as exiles and mi­g rants—­i ndenture ­women’s bodies forced into alien British garb in preparation for her departure from India, post-­indenture bodies in search of new homes poignantly burdened by a full wardrobe of clothing tailored specifically to their size and of their own choosing. As a “playful” conclusion to a series that seeks to trace the compulsions of belonging from the ancestral to the con­ temporary, Gosine offers a T-­shirt with the word “Parisien” written in Hindi against the tricolors of the French national flag. With this evocative multilayering that pulls from all the cultural influences of his own ongoing arrivals and departures, the artist considers, “[p]erhaps I d ­ idn’t need to belong any more?”37 As Gosine says of another of his per­for­mance pieces, Our Holy W ­ aters, And Mine, in order to recognize the “complex humanity of the indentured” it is critical to “deessentialize geo­graph­i­cal ties to India and biological ones to Indianness.” The Gan­ges—­holiest of ­waters in India among Hindus—is but one body of ­water among “the historical waterways passed by indentureds” and, as such, this piece “[r]eject[s] the Indian river Gan­ges as ‘our holy ­waters’ ” to privilege instead the “twelve waterways” crossed during indenture.38 Gosine’s art, like Nanan’s, asks us to recall and reinsert the a­ ctual h ­ uman experiences that have not only constituted indenture’s history of trauma, re­sis­tance, and survival but, most importantly, helped shape (post)indenture destinies beyond India.

“We Are Not fake Indians” According to Indo-­Fijian cultural historian Brij Lal (2001),39 constructs of belonging for con­temporary post-­indenture communities that remain tethered to

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narratives of “arrival” and “return” are complicated ­because of the pressure to commute their diasporic experience as one primarily of “loss” (of India), thus obscuring the ways in which ­t hese diasporic communities have engendered cultural forms that have thrived within their own network of deferrals and differences. Well into the twenty-­first c­ entury, Lal suggests, mutual recognition between post-­indenture diasporic locations has seldom occurred among groups for whom “looking” to India has been enforced more consistently and systematically than have opportunities to see each other via the shared histories of indenture. Even at pre­sent, what continues to characterize indenture literary or cultural studies is not only its relative understudy in academia, as I have discussed ­earlier, but as well the idea that historical indenture’s expansive cartography warrants the study of t­hese con­temporary post-­indenture locations in isolation and/or against the master map of other histories and migrations. The fact that t­hese points have not been purposefully connected in a transnational or transcultural fashion continues to pose obstacles to reconceptualizing Indian belongingness from a (post)indenture diasporic perspective. Tapping into the lateral horizons of post-­indenture diaspora t­ oday would be especially impor­tant to fi­nally undo the colonialist legacy in which (post)indenture perspectives w ­ ere considered irrelevant to the formation and/or narration of (post)indenture lives and identities. Lal’s comments on such disjunctures within the indenture diaspora are echoed by several other leading indenture scholars. Goolam Vahed and Ashwin Desai,40 indenture scholars from South Africa, argue that it is only by tracing and outlining indenture’s afterlives contrapuntally and on a transnational global scale that scholarship on (post)indenture can fi­nally move beyond the “conceptual limitations” thus far imposed on this field. Such a paradigm shift, they stress, would furthermore expose the “pressing need for truly comparative studies of the indentured experience as has been the case in slave/Atlantic studies” and to resist indenture’s conventional positioning solely “within the confines of the vari­ ous nation-­sates in which the indentured found themselves.” 41 This ideological shift is central to what Hosein and Outar argue would provide a new “trans-­ oceanic” ’ orientation in indenture and post-­indenture studies that would allow for “fellow travelers in the larger post-­indentureship diaspora” to know one another.42 Hosein and Outar urge for looking in anticipation to a ­f uture of yet more beginnings and arrivals within and between points of a post-­i ndenture diaspora once explored as discrete parts or connected only through a shared loss of the ancestral. Such alternate intellectual paradigms would reconfigure the very shape and reach of the indenture diaspora and our appreciation of indenture expressive culture, both of which continue to be studied in local and regional, rather than global terms, or, if global, only insofar as this resurrects atavistic connections within and with the standardized South Asian Indian diaspora. In “The Other Side of Midnight,” a chapter from Mr. Tulsi’s Store, Brij Lal writes about the pre­sent need to connect post-­indenture communities and argues

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that this long-­overdue direction in indenture cultural studies is critically impor­ tant to reconceptualizing and remapping belongingness within indenture’s own diasporic pathways. Lal describes his apprehension as he himself fi­nally decides to undertake this endeavor, traveling for the first time to the Ca­rib­bean on what he calls a “journey of diasporic exploration.” 43 His anxiousness issues from inventing f­amily history, as it ­were, by taking a journey his indenture grand­father would have made by ship, to then-­Demerara, had the vessel he was to board not been already full. The grand­father was taken instead to Fiji; de­cades ­later, this grand­son decides to undertake the “journey [his] girmitiya grand­father was drafted to make.” A book about Lal’s personal journey from a rural Indo-­ Fijian boy to an acclaimed professor of indenture studies at the Australian National University, Mr. Tulsi’s Store combines cultural historiography with auto-­ethnography, the titular store referring to the centrality of the Indian store and shop­keeper in fostering cultural life in indenture villages everywhere they ­were formed on plantation colonies. The abovementioned chapter on Lal’s travels in the Ca­rib­bean, however, contains reflections on other kinds of journeys that ­were never made and that have perpetuated lingering blind spots among post-­indenture diasporic groups. Lal refers to what he views as the “mutual ignorance” of members from discrete points within indenture’s map who view each other as being from the “other side of midnight,” a comment made by an Indo-­ Trinidadian w ­ oman when Lal explains his own Indo-­Fijian indenture ancestry. As Lal goes on to explain, “ignorance underlines the enormous geo­g raph­i­cal spread of the Indian indentured diaspora,” and yet, during his time in Guyana, Trinidad, and Suriname, he is struck more so by instances of cultural similarity than dissonance—­the most pervasive “similarity” being “our complex, problematic relationship to India. We do not regard ourselves as the ­children of a lesser god, banished into exile for some misdeed in previous life. We are not ‘naqli’, fake, Indians,” though what is most acutely felt is “our shared diasporic loss.” 44 On the eve of his departure, Lal meditates on the new possibilities post-­indenture persons such as himself now have to overturn the conceptual weight of “midnight” as loss (the ancestral view of kala pani exile) into the promise of a new dawn: Though the Ca­rib­bean ­will always be on the other side of the South Pacific from Fiji, the Indo-­Caribbean diaspora had fi­nally arrived onto the horizons of this Indo-­Fijian. Though the importance of disturbing the conventional discourses and narratives used to represent indenture and post-­indenture lives remains urgent, indenture’s legacy has been to find a “home” precisely through the initial and traumatic loss of ties with India, and an indenture poetics “arrives” most meaningfully and poignantly within its own local, regional, and transnational migratory pathways beyond its engagement with the ancestral. The idea of “loss” that had once signaled the “lesser” or “naqli” (fake) status of the indenture (Lal) or the postponement of recognition between (post)indenture o ­ thers,

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need not persist as the main descriptive of the relationship between post-­ indenture worlds (and India). Rather, the very dissonances that distinguish an indenture poetics can be read as the signs of the rhizomatic errancy and symbolic marronage ­shaped by indenture exile and exiles. To the literary minded, for instance, what cannot escape our notice is the unexpected fusion of signifiers at work in Lal’s strategically formed titles—­recalling both the Tulsi homestead of V. S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas and the metonymic midnight of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s ­Children—­which ironically capture the interplay of multiple diasporic constructs if one w ­ ill privilege an indenture perspective. In Lal, the signifier “Tulsi” and the inference that members of the indenture diaspora are “­children” of each other’s “midnight” dramatize on the page the engimatic otherness of an indenture poetics that exposes the ever-­present commingling of hegemonic and subaltern renderings of dif­fer­ent Indian diasporas. Read in this way, Lal’s fusion clearly reveals that a (post)indenture perspective is far from “lost” or “fake” b ­ ecause it can guide us t­ oward a new way of perceiving previously hidden inequities, such as when distinct diasporas and diasporic frameworks are viewed as being one and the same—­which is to say that the one in which Salman Rushdie ­w ill remain the undisputed literary darling of western and South Asian cosmopolitanists w ­ ill also be the one in which V. S. Naipaul w ­ ill persist as a literary orphan against whom even posthumous academic censure is considered trendy. As mentioned in the Introduction, discussions of Naipaul’s positionality in post-­colonial literary studies serve as a primary illustration of the misunderstandings and misconstructions that percolate around exclusionary constructs of Indianness. As the most famous of Indian Ca­rib­bean writers, Naipaul’s limbo even outside the borders of academic pages is a telling example of how the nebulous categorization of Indo-­Caribbean identity is perhaps most egregiously exploited by the con­temporary Indian mainland. In February of 2002, on the occasion of Naipaul’s Nobel Prize in 2001, the first-­ever international festival of Indian lit­er­a­ture is inaugurated by then-­Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee in the capital, New Delhi. Several media sources announced the momentous occasion of Naipaul’s achievements as worthy of cele­bration by the entire Indian nation, stressing Naipaul’s identity as one other Indian amongst a host of writers who did not even remotely share a personal historical connection with indenture. One newspaper article heralds Naipaul as one among other “so-­ called emigrant writers [who] have written some of the most engrossing pages of Indian writing in En­glish [. . .] the best from India ­Imagined in En­glish.” 45 The 2002 festival, titled “At Home in the World,” is in fact expressly conducted to applaud the global success of Indian lit­er­a­tures via Naipaul, with an opening speech by the Prime Minister that pays the writer a tongue-­in-­cheek tribute by referencing (in the same vein as Rushdie) a line from the infamous travelogue, India: A Million Mutinies Now (1990): “We are honoured to have you with us

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t­ oday, Sir Naipaul. One may or may not agree with your description of India as a land of million mutinies. But I do know that this nation of one billion ­people celebrated your winning the Nobel Prize as a proud event.” 46 The event title, an En­g lish translation of Rabindranath Tagore’s Bengali novel Ghaire Baire, is a confusing choice given the Prime Minister’s warning about the unfair competition vernacular Indian writers w ­ ill now face b ­ ecause of the fame and glitz enjoyed by anglophone Indian writers. Indians, he warns, should not be “dazzled by degrees of foreign universities” b ­ ecause “[l]iterature comes out of a ­people.”  47 Vajpayee’s comments are perhaps even more misplaced given that they disparage Indian writing in En­glish at a gathering meant to celebrate authors who represented a veritable “wish list” of literary stalwarts in which “the Diaspora dominates.” 48 The robust attendance list of nearly seventy writers included Vikram Seth, Amitav Ghosh, Jhumpa Lahiri (who now only writes in Italian), Pico Iyer, Arundhati Roy, Anita Desai, among ­others, and most of whom write exclusively in En­glish. Naipaul’s much-­publicized response to the dilemma raised by Vajpayee, that writers “cannot create a readership,” 49 created a media frenzy and sensational counter-­responses by Indian writers and academics. The South Asian, a critical literary publication, published an entire collection of essays titled At Home in the World: A Homecoming for Language Writers (April 2002) as a direct attack against Naipaul’s alleged derision of bhasha (vernacular) writers. The publication, the editors claim, would hopefully serve as a platform to show that “regional writing is alive and kicking in India” and to give visibility to local Indian writers other­w ise eclipsed by the “big money cheques and celebrity status of Indian authors in En­glish.”50 Several years l­ ater, when Naipaul was awarded a lifetime achievement award in the 2012 Tata Lit­er­a­ture Live! Festival in Mumbai, the celebrated Indian playwright Girish Karnad made a public statement denouncing the nomination, saying that the National Centre of the Performing Arts “coyly failed to mention that Naipaul was not an Indian and has never claimed to be one.”51 Though some may glean a hidden attack in Karnad’s proclamation, it is more appropriate to view his words in the context of Naipaul’s own self-­representation as a “forgotten” Indian,52 which serves as a poignant example of the clash between disparate po­liti­cal histories that trou­ble any normative use of “Indian” in the postcolonial, post-­indenture contexts. While researching for this work, I had to fight to embrace, and eventually normalize, the conceptual tensions indenture discourse posed to postcolonial studies and, in par­tic­u­lar, postcolonial literary studies that tended to place all “Indian” and “South Asian” cultural expression and production ­u nder one homogenous label. Writing this book compelled me to think back to my training in postcolonial literary and cultural studies and to acknowledge that I had been per­sis­tently forcing (post)indenture Indian narratives to arrive and return to the strangest of literary and theoretical canons. Though the only Indo-­

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Caribbean writer included in syllabi throughout my eight years as a gradu­ate student was V. S. Naipaul, we studied the man and author as a naughty postcolonial writer who had lost his way, rather than attending to his writings as a turning point in anglophone Ca­rib­bean fiction that contained eccentricities which ­were the raw birthing pangs of Indo-­Caribbean life in lit­er­a­ture. I was taught to read Naipaul through a variety of lenses—­Foucauldian, Lacanian, Derridean, de Manian, even using de Certeau—­and it ­wasn’t ­until many years ­later that I learned to value Naipaul’s works as both singular and representative while coming to appreciate the significance their genius, rage, and prescience had for writers and artists across the post-­indenture diaspora. I also came to see that ideas about (post)colonial Indianness w ­ ere neither globally applicable nor historically inclusive and that the same South Asian literary theories/theorists that had become indispensable to my way of thinking did not probe beyond the legacies of Eu­ro­pean colonial racism to include the longer, ongoing, and intensifying legacy of casteist hegemony amongst Indians, both in the mainland and in its diasporas, and in analyses that projected Indian lit­er­a­ture as a single and homogenous genre. Committing myself to a study of ­t hese works within the framework of an indenture poetics has as well, quite unexpectedly, proved invaluable to understanding my own experience of being Indian while seldom perceived as one. Contradictory Indianness is a beginning effort to read Indo-­Caribbean literary expression as responding to all the triumphs and complications other Ca­rib­ bean writers wrestle with via the speculative spaces fought for and oftentimes won in text and textuality. The per­sis­tence of mainland and ancestral constructs of exile, alienation, and impurity may yet continue to delimit a fuller appreciation of how and why kala pani passage functions as an index of a radically new poetics of belongingness, but this is also why new constructs of belonging need continuous reimagination and rearticulation as positive, even if contradictory, omens. The ideological stress of this book rests on the idea that for lives forged out of (continual) passage, belongingness within the full spectrum of contradictoriness is a kind of re­sis­tance against closure that allows for the arrival of new imaginaries that are si­mul­ta­neously rooted and routed, thus, always en route. The chorus of voices studied in this work, stretched across centuries and continents, represents more than dissonant fragments of an ancestral past. Rather, they enclose and outline the ever-­shifting plenitude of new and unpredictable worlds that refuse a single point of origin.

Acknowl­edgments

This book has taken what felt like a lifetime to complete and has fittingly been supported by countless individuals, many of whom nurtured me long before it was even conceived. Throughout my life, the importance of teachers, in Bahrain, Kodaikanal, Delhi, Pittsburgh, and New Brunswick, has been constant and essential. While the world did its best to teach me what I could and should achieve, I would never have known what e­ lse could be mine without their profound belief in abilities I did not know to see in myself. Most especially, I wish to remember h ­ ere: Aashish Roy, I w ­ ill never have a chance to thank you for rescuing me from a c­ areer in h ­ otel management and for being the first to teach me how to read the page as if it ­were on fire; Josephine Diamond, you molded me in ­every sense of the word, and I ­will remain in debt for all that your luminous brilliance has taught me. My deepest regret is that in taking too long, I am unable to share with you this iteration of ideas so thoroughly ­shaped by your way of seeing and thinking. To my gradu­ate school mentors Abena Busia and Jorge Marcone—­thank you for nourishing the very first seeds of this work when it was a doctoral thesis and I had no clue where it/I was headed, for humanizing my initiation into academia, and for your unflinching encouragement when I needed it the most. With profound gratitude to Richard Serrano for his invaluable mentorship as his T.A. and for being instrumental in helping me secure a Louis Bevier Dissertation Fellowship in my last year at Rutgers. I ­wouldn’t have been able to complete this work without the generosity of the wonderful community of scholars I have met over the past years at conferences in which I was able to pre­sent early versions of some of the chapters that appear ­here. Thank you to the organizers and participants of the Indo-­Caribbean Lit­ er­a­ture and Culture Conference at the University of Warwick (led by the phenomenal David Dabydeen and his gradu­ate students) where I first presented what

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would eventually become my chapter on Harold Ladoo. I am incredibly appreciative of Abigail Ward’s invitation to pre­sent at the Ca­rib­bean Research Seminar in the North at Nottingham Trent University. Thanks to her organ­ization of a wonderful and intimate cohort of scholars on the Ca­rib­bean. That lecture on creolization, creativity and decolonization was the first in which I explored ideas that eventually went into my chapter on Ismith Khan. The current form of my chapter on Khan is a slightly dif­fer­ent version of my contribution to Beyond Windrush: Rethinking Post-­war West Indian Lit­er­at­ ure. I am incredibly thankful to the editors of this collection, J. Dillon Brown and Leah Rosenberg, and to the anonymous reviewer, for their incisive commentary and suggestions for revision to make it a much better piece than I could have written on my own. Some sections of my introductory chapter extend on ideas I explored in my chapter for Ca­r ib­bean Lit­er­a­ture in Transition Volume One (1800–1920), edited by the inimitable Evelyn O’Callaghan and Tim Watson. Thank you both for being the kind of editors writers dream about, and for shepherding a truly monumental volume of work that w ­ ill redefine ­f uture Ca­rib­bean studies. A very special note of gratitude and appreciation to Brinsley Samaroo for his generous advice and comments over the numerous times we have met, to Clem Seecharan who read and commented on very early versions of chapters I shared with him, and to the ever-­generous Pashington Obeng for his unwavering kindness and wisdom first shared over magical plates of Chicken 65. I am incredibly thankful to the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of San Diego for providing much-­needed financial support over the years ­toward research travel and publication of this book. In all my time at USD, I have been truly fortunate to have had the support of wonderful colleagues in the College of Arts and Sciences and, in par­tic­u ­lar, the En­glish Department. Thank you to the editorial board of the Critical Ca­rib­bean Studies at Rutgers Press, Yolanda Martínez-­San Miguel, and Kathleen López, and Car­ter Mathes, to Kimberly Guinta, editorial director, for her excellent and enthusiastic stewardship of this book from the very beginning, and to every­one ­else who helped steer this work through all its dif­fer­ent stages. It has been nothing short of wonderful to work with ­people so committed to supporting writers through the book publication pro­cess. I am most especially grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their thorough and meticulous reading of this manuscript, with suggestions that guided me in the right direction and gave me the energy I needed to make this a much stronger work. To my many friends spread across the world, thank you for sharing your life with me, for the smallest, grandest, and countless acts of care, ­whether through hosting me in your homes no ­matter what time of the night I called on you, ferrying me in your cars ­because I refused to learn to drive, sharing and cooking elaborate meals, training for marathons, camping trips and hiking, impromptu meetups that felt like no time had passed. Keeping sane through gradu­ate school

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and surviving the vicissitudes of academic life would have been so much harder without the kindness and generosity of you all. For my parents, Ma and Deota, the first teachers, whose love only knows how to encourage, ­t here ­will be no end of thanks from me for being the endless fuel ­behind all my efforts; fi­nally, ­here you are holding in your hands what would literally not have been pos­si­ble without you. With infinite love and adoration for my ­sister, A­di­ti, who supplied the blue aerograms that w ­ ere my first foray into writing, and for keeping intact a glorious sense of humor that always feels like home. And, lastly, to my beloved Dominik Huber, for ­t hose times you ferried the first draft chapters of this book on long subway rides and then for all the ways you have carried me through to this end—­this smallest of blooms hopes to match your boundless beauty.

Notes

introduction Epigraph: Khal Torabully and Marina Car­ter, eds., Coolitude: An Anthology of the Indian ­Labour Diaspora (London: Anthem, 2002), 219. 1. Chutney is a term used in the Ca­rib­bean “to refer to a folk form of Indo-­Trinidadian ­music and dance. Most sources suggest that it derives its tradition from Indian folk practices of the non-­Brahmanical castes and rural folk as well as the ritual sensuous and suggestive dances of Hindu w ­ omen at w ­ omen’s ceremonies on the eve of weddings.” Rhoda Reddock, “Contestations over National Culture in Trinidad and Tobago: Considerations of Ethnicity, Class and Gender.” In Ca­rib­bean Portraits: Essays on Gender Ideologies and Identities, ed. Christine Barrow, 413–435 (Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle, 1998), 433. Chutney is a notable example of an Indo-­Caribbean cultural phenomenon that is seen as a culturally creolizing phenomenon that is also a “po­liti­cal statement about working-­class Indian ­women, particularly in Trinidad.” Roseanne Kanhai, ed., “Matikor”: The Politics of Identity for Indo-­Caribbean ­Women (St. Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago: University of West Indies Press 1999), 98. Chutney soca, popu­lar in Trinidad, Guyana, and Suriname, is a musical genre that combines ele­ments from calypso, chutney, and soca (itself a combination of African and Indian musical styles). 2. From the Hindi root word, kuli, meaning porter or carrier, but its specific connotation of low-­caste status means that it can also be used pejoratively. This was indeed the case ­under colonialism, where “coolie” was used to refer to all “Asiatic” manual laborers conscripted for manual l­ abor. 3. An extension of the poetic and po­liti­cal agendas of the francophone Negritude movement, Torabully’s own coinage sought to establish clear lines of ideological solidarity between the two frameworks while at the same time offering a distinctive poetics of indenture exile and migration. 4. Torabully and Car­ter, Coolitude, 17. 5. Madhavi Kale, Fragment of Empire: Capital, Slavery, and Indian Indentured ­Labour Migration to the British Ca­rib­be­an (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998). 6. John Gaffar La Guerre, ed., Calcutta to Caroni: The East Indians of Trinidad (London: Longman Ca­rib­bean, 1974).

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7. Dave Ramsaran and Linden Lewis, Ca­rib­bean Masala: Indian Identity in Guyana and Trinidad (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2018), 9. 8. Daniel Segal, “Circulation, Transpositions, and the Travails of ‘Creole,’ ” American Ethnologist 33, no. 4 (2006): 580, http://­w ww​.­jstor​.­org​/­stable​/­4098896. 9. Segal, “Circulation,” 581. 10. Ramasaran and Lewis, Ca­rib­bean Masala, 41. 11. Patricia Mohammed, Imaging the Ca­rib­be­an: Culture and Visual Translation (Oxford: Macmillan, 2009), 254. 12. Jean Bonoist, quoted in Khal Torabully, Coolitude, 12–13. 13. Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” in Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, ed. J. Rutherford (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990), 235. 14. Edward Kamau Brathwaite. Contradictory Omens: Cultural Diversity and Integration in the Ca­rib­be­an (Kingston, Jamaica: Savacou, 1974), 58. 15. Michael Bucknor and Alison Donnell, eds., The Routledge Companion to Anglophone Ca­rib­bean Lit­er­at­ ure (Routledge, 2013), 3. 16. Salman Rushdie, ed. with Elizabeth West. Mirrorwork: Fifty Years of Indian Writing, 1947–1997 (Henry Holt and Com­pany, New York: 1997). xvii. 17. It should be noted that Rushdie does include Naipaul’s fictions, The Mystic Masseur (1957), Miguel Street (1959), and A House for Mr. Biswas (1961) in his larger reading of continental South Asian writing in Imaginary Homelands, suggesting that a changing po­liti­cal climate distinguishes the intimate and playful humor of Naipaul’s early fictions from the moribund outlook beginning with Mimic Men (1967). 18. This despite Naipaul’s explanation that the title, An Area of Darkness (the first in his morbid travelogue series on India), was chosen to characterize the “absolute blankness” of India as understood by the “forgotten p ­ eople” of history such as himself. 19. Vijay Mishra, The Lit­er­a­ture of the Indian Diaspora: Theorizing the Diasporic Imaginary (London and New York: Routledge, 2007), 2. 20. The sentiments of this poem are echoed in an essay in Walcott’s collection, What the Twilight Says (1999), which argues that Naipaul’s pessimism and desolate outlook are symptoms of the author’s desire for equal status with the “master” Western litterateur. 21. Caryl Phillips, “C. L. R. James: The Most Noteworthy Ca­rib­bean Mind of the Twentieth ­Century,” The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education 33 (2001): 120. 22. Carole Boyce Davies and Elaine Savory Fido, eds., Out of the Kumbla: Ca­rib­bean ­Women and Lit­er­a­ture (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1990), xviii. 23. Mohammed, Imaging the Ca­rib­be­an, 254. 24. David Dabydeen and Nana Wilson-­Tagoe, eds., A Reader’s Guide to West Indian Lit­er­a­ture and Black British Lit­er­a­ture (London: Hansib, 1997), 17. 25. Torabully and Car­ter, Coolitude, 196. 26. Harold Ladoo, No Pain Like This Body, 2nd ed. (1972; repr., Toronto: House of Anansi, 2003). 27. Kumar Mahabir, “Historical Novels on Indentureship in the Caribbean—­ Commemorating ‘Indian Arrival Day’ (May 30th) in Trinidad and Tobago,” Hindu Post, May 25, 2017, https://­w ww​.­hindupost​.­in​/­world​/­historical​-­novels​-­indentureship​-­caribbean​ -­commemorating​-­indian​-­arrival​-­day​-­may​-­30th​-t­ rinidad​-­tobago​/.­ 28. Alison Donnell, Twentieth-­Century Ca­r ib­bean Lit­er­a­ture: Critical Moments in Anglophone Literary History (London: Routledge, 2006), 371.

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29. Jennifer Jackson. “Review of The Dispossessed” in The Ca­rib­bean Writer 7 (1993): 166, https://­d loc​.­com​/­A A00032523​/­00007​/­166 30. Carolyn Allen, “The Prob­lem of Definition,” in Questioning Creole: Creolisation and Discourses in Ca­rib­bean Culture, eds. Verene Shepherd and G. L. Richards (Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle, 2002), 56. 31. Shalini Puri, The Ca­rib­bean Postcolonial: Social Equality, Post-­Nationalism, and Cultural Hybridity (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). 32. Puri, Ca­rib­bean Postcolonial, 14. 33. This has imposed theoretical blindspots even among post-­indenture diasporic cultural movements. The fact that francophone expressions of an indenture Indian diasporic consciousness, “les indianités francophones,” have not been analyzed comparatively is a “missed opportunity to theorize diaspora in a transcultural French Ca­rib­bean context,” and, for instance, Indo-­Guadeloupean Ernest Moutoussamy’s theorization of “indianité” has never come into dialogue with Khal Torabully’s “coolitude.” Brinda Mehta, “Indianités Francophones: Kala Pani Narratives,” L’Esprit Créateur 50, no. 2 (Summer 2010), 7, 6. 34. The term British Raj refers to the period, roughly between 1858 to 1947, during which the South Asian subcontinent (i.e., current Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh) ­were ­under British rule. 35. Th ­ ese are a continuation of Ghosh’s e­ arlier renderings of colonial Indian indentureship in Asia in The Glass Palace (New York: Random House, 2000) and the semi-­ autobiographical essay collection Dancing in Cambodia and At Large in Burma (Delhi: Ravi Dayal Publisher, 1998). 36. Gabrielle Hosein, and Lisa Outar, eds., Indo-­Caribbean Feminist Thought: Genealogies, Theories, Enactments (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 9. 37. Hosein and Outar, Indo-­Caribbean Feminist Thought, 9. 38. Hosein and Outar, Indo-­Caribbean Feminist Thought, 12–13. ­ omen Writers Negotiate 39. Brinda Mehta, Diasporic (Dis)locations: Indo-­Caribbean W the Kala Pani (Jamaica: University of West Indies Press, 2004), 4. 40. Brinda Mehta, “Indianités Francophones: Kala Pani Narratives.” L’Esprit Créateur 50, no. 2, Indianités francophones / Indian Ethnoscapes in Francophone Lit­er­a­ture (Summer 2010): 1. 41. Mehta, Diasporic (Dis)locations, 13, 7. 42. Mehta, Diasporic (Dis)locations, 7. 43. Focusing on calypsos and soca-­chutney, Puri suggests that a dougla poetics has the potential to envision “egalitarian hybrid identities delegitimized or disallowed by dominant cultural nationalist discourses” (Puri, Ca­rib­bean Postcolonial, 15). 44. Mehta, Diasporic (Dis)Locations, 543. 45. Jennifer Rahim, “Dougla, Half-­Doogla, Travesao, and the Limits of Hybridity,” Anthurium: A Ca­rib­bean Studies Journal 7, no. 1 (2010): 10, https://­anthurium​.­miami​.­edu​ /­articles​/­abstract​/­10​.­33596​/­anth​.­147​/­. Arguing for the “limits of hybridity,” Jennifer Rahim refers to her own personal genealogy as a “travesao” to demonstrate the ways in which her Indian, African, and Eu­ro­pean ancestry work in uneven and not always liberatory ways. B ­ ecause of the way in which ­others read her racial identity, Rahim argues that older racist attitudes “often lurk just beneath the surface of deceptive change and cele­bration of mixing. The Dougla is the site of such deception, indeed so are other hybrid identity categories.” See also Mariam Pirbhai, “Recasting Jahaji-­Bhain: Plantation History and

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the Indo-­Caribbean W ­ omen’s Novel in Trinidad, Guyana and Martinique,” in Critical Perspectives on Indo-­Caribbean ­Women’s Lit­er­at­ ure, eds. Joy Mahabir and Mariam Pirbhai (New York: Routledge, 2013). 46. ­After the abolition of slavery, Portuguese, Chinese, and Indian workers w ­ ere indentured in the West Indies. While the Portuguese indentured w ­ ere able to formally contest their work conditions, the complaints of Asians ­were largely ignored. However, colonial recruiters and officers began to f­ avor workers from India as most suitable for the tropical Ca­rib­bean climate and for the hard manual ­labor, in addition to being the most “industrious.” With the recruitment of greater numbers of indentured from India, Portuguese and Chinese communities in the West Indies developed from being a part of the working class to becoming petty entrepreneurs. (See also Kale, Fragment of Empire.) 47. David Dabydeen and Brinsley Samaroo, eds., Across the Dark ­Waters: Ethnicity and Indian Identity in the Ca­rib­be­an (London: Macmillan, 1996), 1. 48. Kale Fragment of Empire; Ron Ramdin, Arising From Bondage: a History of the Indo-­ Caribbean ­People (New York: New York University Press, 2000). 49. According to Look Lai, “[c]ontract or indentured l­ abor was not new to the Amer­i­ cas: indeed, it had preceded the introduction of slavery. What was new about its revival in the nineteenth c­ entury was the source of the contract ­labor (overwhelmingly Asian—­ that is, Chinese and Indian) and the more elaborate mechanisms surrounding its operation in the post-­Emancipation period” (Look Lai, Indentured ­Labor, xi). 50. Brinsley Samaroo, “Two Abolitions: African Slavery and East Indian Indentureship,” India in the Ca­rib­be­an (London: Hansib, 1987), 38 (original emphasis). 51. Vijay Prashad, The Kar­ma of Brown Folk (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000). ­ abour Overseas 52. Hugh Tinker, A New System of Slavery: The Export of Indian L 1830–1920 (London: Oxford University Press, 1974), 1. 53. Rosemarjin Hoefte, In Place of Slavery: A Social History of British Indian and Javense Laborers in Suriname (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998), 1. 54. Hoefte, In Place of Slavery, 1–2. 55. David Dabydeen and Brinsley Samaroo, eds, India in the Ca­rib­be­an (London: Hansib, 1987), 28. 56. The word “sepoy” is used to identify a soldier of the army. As Khal Torabully notes, “[b]y the nineteenth c­ entury, it had become common practice for inhabitants of certain districts to supply the new rulers—­t he British—­w ith military recruits. Yang’s study of Saran district in Bihar, for example, reveals that the district had provided the British Army with 10,000 sepoy recruits by the mid-­nineteenth c­ entury. He shows that where migratory trends developed, vari­ous types of ­labour, including seasonal work and overseas indenture, would be taken up concludes that the rural mi­grant displayed considerable skill and sophistication in his migratory choices” (Torabully, Coolitude, 27). 57. Hugh Tinker, The Banyan Tree: Overseas Emigrants from India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh (Oxford University Press, 1977); Tina Ramnarine, “ ‘Brotherhood of the Boat’: Musical Dialogues in a Ca­rib­bean Context,” British Journal of Ethnomusicology 7 (British Forum for Ethnomusicology, 1998): 1–22; Gaiutra Bahadur, Coolie ­Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture (University of Chicago Press, 2013). 58. In exchange for repatriation, Indians received plots of land, mostly in the countryside and mostly in and around former sugar plantations. According to Walton Look Lai, “[m]ost of the lands acquired by Indians in the initial post-1870 years came via the land-­

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for-­return-­passage commutation program, u ­ nder which f­ ree grants of 10 acres . . . ​­were made in exchange for the return passage rights of the grantees” (Look Lai, Indentured ­Labor, 229). Most of ­t hese settlements failed ­either due to the Indians’ inability to sustain a village milieu or b ­ ecause the land itself was not tillable and/or unlivable (i.e., some ­were swamps, some sand plains). Kale, Fragment of Empire; Lomarsh Roopnarine, Indo-­ Caribbean Indenture: Re­sis­tance and Accommodation, 1838–1920 (Jamaica, Barbados, and Trinidad and Tobago: University of West Indies Press, 2007). 59. Look Lai, Indentured ­Labor, 217. One noteworthy exception to this line of argument is provided by Kusha R. Haraksingh, who argues that for indenture populations in the village contracts on paper would not have been as deeply valued as promises made by word or through ­human transaction. See Kusha R. Haraksingh, “Structure, Pro­cess and Indian Culture in Trinidad,” in ­After the Crossing: Immigrants and Minorities in Ca­rib­ bean Créole Society, ed. Howard Johnson (London: Frank Cass, 1988), 113–122. 60. Puri, Ca­rib­bean Postcolonial, 171. 61. Marina Car­ter, Voices from Indenture: Experiences of Indian Mi­grants in the British Empire (London and New York: Leicester University Press, 1996). 62. Malcolm Cross, “East Indian-­Creole Relations in Trinidad and Guyana in the Late Nineteenth C ­ entury,” in Across the Dark W ­ aters, eds. Dabydeen and Samaroo (London: Macmillan, 1996), 14–38. 63. Clem Seecharan, “Introduction,” in Joseph Ruhomon’s India: The Pro­gress of Her ­People at Home and Abroad, and How Th ­ ose in British Guiana May Improve Themselves (Barbados: University of West Indies Press, 2001), 2. 64. Seecharan, “Introduction,” 20–21. 65. In his essay, “ ‘You Want to Be a Coolie W ­ oman?’: Gender and Ethnic Identity in Indo-­Caribbean ­Women’s Writing,” Jeremy Poynting goes so far as to suggest that Indo-­ Caribbean ­women bear the brunt of the cultural ste­reo­types associated with Indian backwardness. This image is solidified and projected, Poynting suggests, through the figure of the Indian ­woman and is in fact a product of the deep-­rooted chauvinism in Indo-­Caribbean culture. How ­else could it be, Poynting argues, that in the 1990s t­ here was only one novel, “by a [female] writer whose Indianness might well be disputed [Jan Shinebourne], a collection of short stories, and a dozen slim volumes of poetry,” and all mostly published only in the region. In Ca­rib­bean ­Women Writers, ed. Selwyn Cudjoe (Wellesley, MA: Calaloux Publications, 1990), 99. 66. Tinker, A New System of Slavery, 19. 67. Tinker, A New System of Slavery, 383 (emphasis mine). 68. Brij V. Lal, Chalo Jahaji: On a Journey through Indenture in Fiji (Canberra, Australia: Australian National University, 2001), ix, x. 69. Lal, Chalo Jahaji, x (emphasis mine). 70. As indenture historians Goolam Vahed and Ashwin Desai argue, the “neo-­slavery/ Tinkerian paradigm” has imposed “conceptual limitations” on the research of indenture ­labor and withheld possibilities of studying the indenture diaspora is “all of its complexity, including the intra-­and inter-­community relations in the plural socie­ties created by indentured immigration.” Vahed and Desai, “Indian Indenture: Speaking Across the Oceans,” Man in India 92, no. 2 (2012): 195. 71. Car­ter, Voices, 2. 72. Car­ter, Voices, 16. 73. Car­ter, Voices, 16.

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74. Sean Lokaisingh-­Meighoo, “The Diasporic Mo(ve)ment: Indentureship and Indo-­ Caribbean Identity,” in Nation Dance: Religion, Identity, and Cultural Difference in the Ca­rib­be­an, ed. Patrick Taylor (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 187 (emphasis mine). 75. Lokaisingh-­Meighoo, “The Diasporic Mo(ve)ment,” 186. The huge migration to North Amer­i­ca and E ­ ngland, which is seen as the “motherland” to many Ca­rib­be­a ns, was of course not attractive to many Indians who did not want to migrate to a new place. Subsequently, t­ here arose a demand for a separate “Indian world” in the Ca­rib­bean, to be named Bharatiyadesh, for the East Indians of Guyana, Surinam, and Trinidad and ­ aters, 9). As Brinsley Samaroo claims, “[i]mmeTobago (Dabydeen and Samaroo, Dark W diately ­a fter the First World War, ­t here ­were strenuous efforts to create a mini-­India in British Guiana through a colonization scheme which would have replaced the indenture agenda” (Dark ­Waters, 128). This experiment never took ground, primarily ­because of a lack of support from India. 76. Lokaisingh-­Meighoo, “The Diasporic Mo(ve)ment,” 188. 77. Roopnarine, Indo-­Caribbean Indenture, 2007; Bahadur, Coolie ­Woman, 2013. 78. Clem Seecharan, India and the Shaping of the Indo-­Guyanese Imagination 1890s–1920s (Leeds: Peepal Tree Books, 1993). 79. Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” 227. 80. Torabully, Coolitude, 146, 149 (emphasis added). 81. In the twenty-­first ­century Ca­rib­bean context, populations considered to be “first” in the lands are in the extreme minority. While some descendants of the Carib and Arawak remain in Dominica and Guyana, Western invasion ensured the near complete annihilation of precolonial Indigenous inhabitants. 82. Robert Young, “Postcolonial Remains,” New Literary History 43, no. 1 (Winter 2012): 24. 83. Maximilian Forte, “Extinction: The Historical Trope of Anti-­Indigeneity in the Ca­rib­bean,” Issues in Ca­rib­bean Amerindian Studies 6, no. 4 (August 2005): 3, https://­ indigenouscaribbean​.­fi les​.­wordpress​.­com​/­2008​/­05​/f­ orteatlantic2005​.­pdf. 84. Walter Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2012, first published 2000). 85. Aisha Khan, ed., Islam in the Amer­i­cas (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2015), 2, 3. 86. Khan, Islam in the Amer­i­cas, 25. 87. “Et si les Indes ne sont pas de ce côté où tu te couches, que m’importe! / Inde je te dirai! Inde de l’Ouest: afin que je regagne mon rêve. / Afin que rien ici ne soit perdu, de ce songe effaré! L’image est bonne/ et je la garde.” Édouard Glissant, “The Conquest,” in Les Indes (The Indies) first published in 1965, translated by Dominique O’Neill (Toronto: Éditions du GREF, 1992), 156. 88. Michel de Montaigne, The Essays of Michel de Montaigne, translated by Charles Cotton and edited by W. Carew Hazlitt (London and New York: G. Bell & Sons, 1892); Aphra Behn, Oroonoko, or, The Royal Slave (1688), edited and with an introduction by Jane Todd (London, ­England: Penguin Books, 2003); François-­René, vicomte de Chateaubriand, Atala / René (1801), translated by Irving Putter (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980).

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89. From Walt Whitman’s collection Leaves of Grass (1892). The title of this poem heads E. M. Forster’s critique of empire in his novel, A Passage to India, published in 1924. 90. The “cultural paradox” of nineteenth-­century Amer­i­ca is that it was concurrently postcolonial and imperial and gave “rise to essential ambiguities and contradictions” in American culture that encompassed the continent’s in­de­pen­dence from its colonizer, Britain, as well as the continued genocide of the native population. Marek Paryz, The Postcolonial and Imperial Experience in American Transcendentalism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 2–3. 91. Vijay Prashad, The Kar­ma of Brown Folk (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 34, 41, 43. 92. Lomarsh Roopnarine, “East Indian Indentured Emigration to the Ca­r ib­be­a n: Beyond the Push and Pull Model,” Ca­rib­bean Studies 31, no. 2 (July–­December 2003): 97–134. 93. The Law Code of Ma­nu, trans. Patrick Olivelle (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 2009), 31–34, 239. 94. Tinker, The Banyan Tree, 1977. 95. In 1979, then Prime Minister Morarji Desai officially converted the erstwhile “Cellular Jail” into a national memorial site. 96. In some cases, this choice was made upon repatriation to India and the desire to seek overseas work for better financial prospects. In ­others, laborers traveled between indenture colonies looking for better treatment or better wages. 97. Lomarsh Roopnarine, “Trans-­Colonial Migration during East Indian Indentured Servitude in British Guiana and Trinidad,” in The Legacy of Indian Indenture: Historical and Con­temporary Aspects of Migration and Diaspora, eds. Maurits Hassankhan and Lomarsh Roopnarine (London: Routledge, 2016), 15–36. 98. Car­ter, Voices, 183. 99. Rehana Ebr.-­Vally, Kala Pani: Caste and Colour in South Africa (Cape Town: Kwela Books, 2001), 20, 178. 100. Mariam Pirbhai, Mythologies of Migration, Vocabularies of Indenture: Novels of the South Asian Diaspora in Africa, the Ca­rib­bean, and Asia-­Pacific (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), 112. 101. From “agreement,” in reference to the indenture contract, indentured laborers of the Indian Ocean islands are sometimes referred to as “girmitiyas,” meaning ­t hose who signed agreements. Vijay Mishra clarifies that though the term girmit originally only applied to indenture laborers of Fiji and, nominally, South Africa, the “girmit ideology may be productively read as a ‘sign’ which gives the experience of the ‘old’ Indian indenture diaspora a theoretical template.” Vijay Mishra, The Lit­er­a­ture of the Indian Diaspora: Theorizing the Diasporic Imaginary (London and New York: Routledge, 2007), 22. According to Vijay Prashad, indenture is “the experience of displacement summed up by Indian indentured laborers in the vernacularized form of “agreement,” i.e., girmit. Girmit also became the word used by Indians to mean narak, or hell, in reference to plantation slavery (Prashad, The Kar­ma, 1). 102. Frank Birbalsingh, Jahaji: An Anthology of Indo-­Caribbean Fiction (Toronto: TSAR Publications, 2000), xi. 103. Dabydeen and Samaroo, Dark ­Waters, 1. 104. Roopnarine, “Trans-­Colonial Migration,” 5.

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105. Khan, “Journey.” 106. Mohammed, Imaging the Ca­rib­be­an, 256. 107. Puri, Ca­rib­bean Postcolonial, 65. 108. Samuel Selvon, “Three into One ­Can’t Go—­East Indian, Trinidadian, Westindian,” in India in the Ca­rib­be­an, eds. David Dabydeen and Brinsley Samaroo (London: Hansib, 1987), 13–24. 109. Selvon, “Three into One,” 21 (original emphasis). 110. Michael Dash, The Other Amer­i­ca: Ca­rib­bean Lit­er­a­ture in a New World Context (Charlottesville: University Press of ­Virginia, 1998). 111. Brathwaite, Contradictory Omens, 10. 112. Allen, “The Prob­lem of Definition.” 113. Brathwaite, Contradictory Omens, 1974. 114. George Lamming, “The Indian Presence as a Ca­rib­bean Real­ity,” in Indenture and Exile, ed. Frank Birbalsingh (Toronto: TSAR Publications, 1989), 54. 115. Shepherd and Richards, Questioning Creole. 116. George Lamming, The Emigrants (Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1994, first published 1954). 117. Antonio Benítez Rojo, The Repeating Island: The Ca­rib­bean and the Postmodern Perspective, 2nd ed., trans. James E. Maraniss (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996). 118. While current studies focus on the migratory aspect of the Ca­rib­bean with re­spect to the many slave communities brought to work on the plantations, it must be remembered that, prior to this, the islands had served as migratory ports for the Saladoid. When Columbus first landed in the Greater Antilles, he met the Saladoid (named a­ fter the Saladero site in Venezuela) ­people, ancestors of the Taino ­people (­later called the Arawaks), who had migrated extensively in the Ca­rib­bean islands, established trade amongst themselves, had transformed from hunters to farmers to fishers and developed ceramic products. In the mid-­fifteenth ­century, therefore, the Greater Antillean region was populated by descendants of the Saladoid mi­grants, and the languages they spoke ­were variants of Arawakan languages. Samuel Wilson, ed., The Indigenous ­People of the Ca­rib­be­an (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1997), 5. 119. Selwyn Cudjoe, “Identity in Ca­rib­bean Lit­er­a­ture,” 2001, http://­w ww​.­trinicenter​ .­com​/­Cudjoe​/­2001​/­June​/­24062001b​.­htm. 120. Shona Jackson, Creole Indigeneity: Between Myth and Nation in the Ca­r ib­be­an (University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 211, 2. 121. Qtd. in Roger Abrahams, “About Face: Rethinking Creolization,” in Creolization As Cultural Creativity, eds. Robert Baron and Ana C. Cara (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2011), 294. 122. Abrahams, “About Face,” 291. 123. Lee Haring, “Techniques of Creolization” in Creolization As Cultural Creativity, eds. Robert Baron and Ana C. Cara (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2011),179 (original emphases). 124. Elizabeth Deloughery, “Island Writing, Creole Cultures,” in Cambridge History of Postcolonial Lit­e r­a­ture, ed. Ato Quayson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 821–822. 125. DeLoughery, “Island Writing,” 806. As Deloughery demonstrates, “Robinsonades,” or “island solitude and adventure stories,” which became so popu­lar in the Western lit-

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erary imaginary of the eigh­teenth and nineteenth centuries, had their roots in a text from Islamic Spain (Ibn Tufail’s twelfth-­century text Hayy ibn Yaqdhan), which in turn was a revision of an ­earlier Persian text that was translated into Latin and En­glish in the seventeenth ­century. 126. Aisha Khan, “Journey to the Center of the Earth: The Ca­rib­bean as Master Symbol,” Cultural Anthropology 16, no. 3 (2001): 272. 127. Segal, “Circulation,” 579–580. 128. The term Creole in Trinidad enabled the “construction of ‘the African’ as both bereft of ‘civilization’ and highly miscible vis-­à-­v is ‘the Eu­ro­pean’ such that ‘achievements’ by Afro-­Trinidadian and ‘mixed’ persons w ­ ere preemptively registered as traceable to ‘Eu­ro­pean’ sources.” Segal, “Circulation,” 580. 129. Stuart Hall, “Creolité and the Pro­cess of Creolization,” republished in Creolizing Eu­rope: Legacies and Transformations, eds. Encarnación Gutiérrez Rodríguez and Shirley Ann Tate (Cambridge: Liverpool University Press, first published 2003), 2013, 23–24. 130. Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturism and Media (London: Routledge, 1994). 131. Michel-­Rolph Trouillot, “Culture on the Edges: Ca­rib­bean Creolization in Histori­ utures, ed. Brian cal Context,” in From the Margins: Historical Anthropology and Its F Keith Axel (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 189–210. 132. Françoise Lionnet and Shu-­mei Shih, eds., The Creolization of Theory (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011) 133. Mohammed, Imaging the Ca­rib­be­an, 249. 134. Mohammed, Imaging the Ca­rib­be­an, 252. 135. Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphaël Confiant, “In Praise of Creoleness,” trans. Mohamed Taleb Khyar, Callaloo 13, no. 9 (1990): 891 (original emphasis). 136. Françoise Lionnet, Creolite in the Indian Ocean: Two Models of Cultural Diversity,” Yale French Studies 82 (1993): 101–112. 137. Richard Price and Sally Price, “Shadowboxing in the Mangrove,” Cultural Anthropology 12, no. 1 (1997): 3–36. 138. Torabully, Coolitude, 145. 139. Torabully, Coolitude, 144. 140. Torabully, Coolitude, 145. Similarly, in Glissant’s work, as Valérie Loichot shows, it is “masala,” an Indian spice mix associated with the minority Tamil origin Indians, that comes to serve as the “privileged” model with which Glissant underscores creolization’s qualities of “improvisation, adaptability, dynamism, instability, and complexity.” In this way, he locates Martinique as a satellite nation of the French colonizing order while si­mul­ta­neously positioning it outside of the “assimilating and annihilating forces of globalization.” Valérie Loichot, “Between Breadfruit and Masala: Food Politics in Glissant’s Martinique,” Callaloo 30, no. 1 (Winter 2007): 124–125, http://­w ww​.­jstor​.­org​ /­stable​/3­ 0135878. 141. Birbalsingh, Jahaji, vii. 142. Aimé Césaire, Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (Return to My Native Land), trans. John Berger and Anna Bostock (Middlesex, E ­ ngland: Penguin Books, 1969; first published by Présence Africaine 1956), 48. 143. Mazisi Kunene, introduction to Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (Return to My Native Land), by Aimé Césaire (Middlesex, ­England: Penguin Books, 1969), 9, 23. 144. Torabully, Coolitude, 13, 223.

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145. George Lamming, “Ca­rib­bean ­Labor, Culture, and Identity,” in Ca­rib­bean Cultural Identities, ed. Glyne Griffith (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2001). This essay is a printed version of an address Lamming delivered at the Cave Hill campus in Barbados in 1994. 146. George Lamming, The Pleasures of Exile (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992, first published 1960), 37, 38. 147. Lamming, The Pleasures of Exile, 42. 148. Lamming, The Pleasures of Exile, 37. 149. Simon Gikandi, Writing in Limbo: Modernism and Ca­rib­bean Lit­er­a­ture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), 108. 150. Lamming, The Pleasures of Exile, 225. 151. Kenneth Ramchand, The West Indian Novel and Its Background (London: Faber & Faber), 1970, 3. 152. Ramchand, The West Indian Novel, 189. 153. Shohat and Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism. 154. Paul Gilroy, new introduction to ­There ­Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack (Routledge, 2002). 155. Gilroy, ­Ain’t No Black, xv. 156. Gilroy, ­Ain’t No Black, xv. 157. Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” 226 (original emphasis). 158. Hall, “Creolité,” 17. 159. Tim Adams, “Cultural Hallmark,” September 2007, The Guardian, http://­w ww​ .­t heguardian​.­com​/­society​/­2007​/­sep​/­23​/­communities​.­politicsphilosophyandsociety. 160. Adams, “Cultural Hallmark.” 161. Qtd. in Mahin Gosine, East Indians and Black Power in the Ca­rib­be­an: The Case of Trinidad (New York: Africana Research Publications, 1986), 34. 162. Look Lai, Indentured ­Labor, 255. 163. Kanhai, Matikor, 13, 65. 164. Shalini Puri, “Race, Rape, and Repre­sen­ta­tion: Indo-­Caribbean ­Women and Cultural Nationalism,” Cultural Critique, no. 36 (Spring 1997): 119–163, https://­doi​-­org​ .­sandiego​.i­ dm​.­oclc​.o ­ rg​/1­ 0​.­2307​/1­ 354502. 165. Qtd. in Ferne L. Regis, “The Dougla in Trinidad’s Consciousness,” History in Action 2, no. 1 (2011), 1. 166. Mehta argues that the north-­south divide in India, in which northern Hindu Aryan culture predominates, darker-­skinned Indians of the south, such as ­those migrating from southern ports of India, such as Tamil Nadu, “­were reduced to an ethnic sub-­caste even before the ‘kala pani’ voyage on the treacherous ­waters of the Atlantic [. . .] Discriminatory practices based on skin coloring and the inherent Aryan belief in the primitiveness and cultural inferiority of non-­A ryan social systems depicted Madrasis as . . . ​less Indian and therefore, less Hindu than the fair-­skinned northerners from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, thereby justifying their marginalization within the larger Indo-­Caribbean community in British Guiana” (Mehta, Diasporic (Dis)Locations, 542). 167. Hosein and Outar, eds., Indo-­Caribbean Feminist Thought, 206 (original italics). 168. Interestingly, Dionne Brand’s introduction to Ladoo’s No Pain Like This Body (discussed in chapter 3) has been heralded as “one of the most astonishing critical statements by an African-­Caribbean writer on Indo-­Caribbean expressive culture since Derek

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Walcott’s Nobel Prize address.” David Chariandy, “The Life of Harold Sonny Ladoo.” Canadian Lit­er­a­ture: A Quarterly of Criticism and Review, no. 188 (Spring 2006): 141. 169. Derek Walcott, “The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory” (Nobel lecture, December 7, 1992). The Nobel Prize, https://­w ww​.n ­ obelprize​.­org​/p ­ rizes​/­literature​/1­ 992​/w ­ alcott​ /­lecture​/­. 170. Walcott, “The Antilles.” 171. Enactments of the Ramayana performed during the Ramlila (or Ramleela) festival have been impor­tant to rural Indians across the West Indies (in par­tic­u ­lar Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana, Suriname, Martinique, and Guadeloupe). The stories ­behind the “leelas” (or, plays) ­were close readings of Tulsidas’ sixteenth-­century version of the Ramayana, which glorifies exile as a cumulative experience of triumphs and tribulations. Burton Sankeralli, “Indian Presence in Carnival,” The Drama Review 42, no. 3 (1998): 203–212; Vijay Mishra ed., Rama’s Banishment (London: Heinemann, 1979). 172. See Steven Vertovec, The Hindu Diaspora: Comparative Patterns (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), and Morton Klass, East Indians in Trinidad: A Study of Cultural Persistance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961). 173. Sherry-­Ann Singh, The Ramayana Tradition and Socio-­Religious Change in Trinidad 1917–1990 (Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle, 2012), 71. 174. Singh, The Ramayana Tradition, 73. 175. As Singh shows, the specific “diasporic” character of the Ramacharitmanas came out of the “Bhak­ti tradition [which] served as a link to the emotional and cultural ethos of the motherland [. . . .] Rama’s dignity and endurance . . . ​an ideal worthy of emulation” (Singh, The Ramayana Tradition, 69–71). 176. From E. J. Babineau’s Love of God and Social Duty in the Ramcaritmanas (Delhi, India: Motilal Banarsidass Publishers Pvt. Ltd., 1979), 92, qtd. in Sherry-­A nn Singh, Ramayana Tradition, 68. 177. Aliyah Khan, Far from Mecca: Globalizing the Muslim Ca­rib­be­an (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2020), 2 (original emphasis). 178. Patricia Mohammed, “Island Currents, Global Aesthetics: Islamic Iconography in Trinidad,” in Islam in the Amer­i­cas, ed. Aisha Khan (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2015), 298. 179. Moko Jumbie is a form of stilt-­dancing mostly popu­lar in the U.S. Virgin Islands and includes Carnivalesque masquerades with other animal repre­sen­ta­tions, such as donkeys, bears, and even popu­lar figures of the devil (Sankeralli, “Indian Presence,” 1998; Khan, Far from Mecca, 2020). 180. Roger Sanjek, ed. Ca­rib­bean Asians: Chinese, Indian, and Japa­nese Experiences in Trinidad and the Dominican Republic (Asian American Centre at Queens College, SUNY, 1990), 116. 181. According to the historian Prabhu P. Mohapatra, “wherever Indian labourers w ­ ere sent as indentured labourers be it the African continent or the American—­from Mauritius to Natal, to Fiji and the Ca­rib­bean colonies—­Moharram had emerged as the most impor­tant and spectacular festival of the Indian Diaspora in the nineteenth c­ entury. If the ‘sightseer’ had been more knowledgeable he would have been acquainted with the Hosay massacre in Trinidad in 1884 [and] would have exclaimed greater surprise at the fact that Hindus and Sunnite Muslim labourers had even laid down their lives in order to assert their rights to celebrate a minority Shi-­sect festival.” Prabhu Mohapatra, “ ‘Following Custom’?: Repre­sen­ta­tions of Community among Indian Immigrant ­Labour

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in the West Indies, 1880–1920,” International Review of Social History 51 (2006): 181, https://­w ww​.­jstor​.­org​/­stable​/­26405455. 182. Kris Rampersad, Finding a Place: IndoTrinidadian Lit­er­a­ture (Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle, 2002). ­ fter Slavery: A Society in 183. Neil Sookdeo, Freedom, Festivals, and Caste in Trinidad A Transition (Bloomington, IN: Xlibris, 2001). 184. Pirbhai, “Recasting Jahaji-­Bhain” 25, 39. 185. Pirbhai, “Recasting Jahaji-­Bhain” 10. 186. Though most internationally well-­k nown Indo-­Caribbean writers in the recent past have been Indo-­Trinidadian, an Indo-­Guyanese writing tradition is equally and substantially rich and long-­standing. Some of the earliest Indo-­Caribbean writers are from Guyana, e.g., Bechu and Joseph Ruhomon, and some of the first Indo-­Caribbean ­women writers are Guyanese, e.g., Rajkumari Singh, Mahadai Das, and Jan Shinebourne. The fact that Indo-­Guyanese communities, more so than the Indo-­Trinidadian, had been confined to rural villages well into the late de­cades of the twentieth ­century does much to explain why an Indo-­Guyanese literary tradition emerged into prominence ­after the Indo-­ Trinidadian. See also Mariam Pirbhai’s chapter on Indo-­Guyanese writing in Mythologies of Migration, Vocabularies of Indenture: Novels of the South Asian Diaspora in Africa, the Ca­rib­bean, and Asia-­Pacific (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009): 99–126. 187. Rec­ords show that Totaram Sanadhya, though a Brahmin by caste, enlisted himself as a Ksha­tri­ya in his recruitment papers, as it was well known that Brahmins would not be accepted for recruitment by the arkatis. He began to use the title Pundit (meaning priest) in Fiji. This was a title conferred on him by his own community for this knowledge of the scriptures, passages of which he would recite to t­ hose gathered around his “hut” in the eve­nings. 188. Holi Songs was first translated into En­glish by Gaiutra Bahadur for her book Coolie W ­ oman: The Odyssey of Indenture (2013). It has since been published as a separate songbook called I Even Regret Night: Holi Songs of Demrara translated by Rajiv Mohabir in 2019, which I use in my reading. 189. Jeremy Poynting, “Seeing with Other Eyes: Reflections on Christian Proselytization in Indo-­Caribbean Fiction,” Kunapipi 8, no. 2 (1986): 98, 106, https://­ro​.­uow​.­edu​.a­ u​ /­kunapipi​/­vol8​/­iss2​/­16.

chapter 1  — ­indenture passage and poetics in totaram sanadhya and lalbihari sharma Some portions of this chapter have appeared previously in “South Asian Migration and Settlement Stories,” in Ca­rib­bean Lit­er­a­ture in Transition Volume One (1800–1920), eds. Evelyn O’Callaghan and Tim Watson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2021), 278–293. Epigraph 1: Totaram Sanadhya, My Twenty-­One Years in the Fiji Islands, ed. and trans. John Dunham Kelly and Uttara Kumari Singh (Fiji Museum, Suva, 2003), 112. Twenty-­ One Years, originally published in 1914, was composed in India a­ fter Sanadhya left Fiji. He arrived in Fiji in 1893 at the age of seventeen and lived ­t here for twenty-­one years before returning to India in 1904 with his wife, the d ­ aughter of an ex-­indenture Indian in Fiji. A ­ fter many years of activism against indenture in India, he retired to and died in Gandhi’s Sabramati Ashram in Gujarat.

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Epigraph 2: LalBihari Sharma, I Even Regret Night: Holi Songs of Demerara, trans. Rajiv Mohabir (Kaya Press, Los Angeles, 2019), 29. This text was originally published as Damra Phag Bahar in 1915. 1. Mariam Pirbhai, Mythologies of Migration, Vocabularies of Indenture: Novels of the South Asian Diaspora in Africa, the Ca­rib­bean, and Asia-­Pacific (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), 133. 2. Rec­ords show that Totaram Sanadhya, though a Brahmin by caste, enlisted himself as a Ksha­tri­ya in his recruitment papers as it was well known that Brahmins would not be accepted for recruitment by the arkatis. He began to use Pundit (meaning priest) in Fiji. This was a title conferred on him by his own community for his knowledge of the scriptures, passages of which he would recite to t­ hose gathered around his “hut” in the eve­nings. Sanadhya had managed to secretly smuggle a copy of holy scriptures transcribed by his b ­ rother, and often sat in the eve­nings reciting passages ­a fter a day of ­labor. He soon had ­others joining him to listen to his recitations and ­later became a community religious leader, which is why he is sometimes referred to as Pundit Totaram Sanadhya. 3. ­Until very recently, only two known texts (both by men) about indenture from the perspective of the indenture ­were thought to exist. One was Sanadhya’s anti-­indenture writing, as mentioned e­ arlier, and the other from Suriname. First published in 1994 as Jeevan Prakash (literally, “expression of life”), this work consists of diary entries by Munshi (meaning “teacher”) Rahman Khan (1874–1972), a descendant of ethnic Afghani Pathans, and is regarded as the only indenture-­period document of Suriname. The text’s translation (as Autobiography of an Indian Indentured Labourer in 2006), much like Sanadhya’s and Sharma’s texts, required the collaborative efforts of both Indo-­Surinamese and Indian scholars fluent in En­g lish, Hindi, Bhojpuri, and Saranami (or Saranami Hindustani, spoken by the Indian population in Suriname) and is a living testimony to the legacy of transnational cultural collaboration within the spaces of (post)indenture migration. 4. Sharma, Holi Songs. 5. Sherry-­Ann Singh, The Ramayana Tradition and Socio-­Religious Change in Trinidad 1917–1990 (Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle, 2012), 68. 6. Brij Lal and Yogendra Yadav, “Hinduism u ­ nder Indenture: Totaram Sanadhya’s Account of Fiji,” The Journal of Pacific History 30, no. 3 (June 1995): 99–111. 7. In their exhaustive analyses of Sanadhaya’s work, John Dunham Kelly and Uttara Kumari Singh (My Twenty-­One Years in the Fiji Islands) and Vijay Mishra point out that Twenty-­One Years can be considered a testimonio sharing the major characteristics of a testimonio as defined by John Beverly in Testimonio: On the Politics of Truth (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), Sanadhya orally recounted what was written down in the text, and, as an ex-­indenture, his recountings represented a marginalized history, he himself representative of the “subaltern [who] was indeed mute throughout the period of indenture” (Vijay Mishra, “Writing Indenture History through Testimonios and Oral Narratives,” in The Routledge Handbook of the Indian Diaspora, eds. Radha Sarma Hegde and Ajaya Kumar Sahoo [London: Routledge, 2017], 42). 8. Sanadhya, Twenty-­One Years. 9. Marina Car­ter, Voices from Indenture: Experiences of Indian Mi­grants in the British Empire (London: Leicester University Press, 1996), 4, 12–13.

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10. Frank Birbalsingh, Jahaji: An Anthology of Indo-­Caribbean Fiction (Toronto: TSAR Publications, 2000), xiv. 11. John Edward Jenkins, Lutchmee and Dilloo (1877), https://­a rchive​.­org​/­details​ /­lutchmeedilloost01jenk. 12. David Dabydeen, introduction to Lutchmee and Dillo: A Study of West Indian Life (Oxford: Macmillan, 2003). 13. Vijay Mishra, The Lit­er­a­ture of the Indian Diaspora: Theorizing the Diasporic Imaginary (London: Routledge, 2007). 14. Marina Car­ter and Khal Torabully, eds. Coolitude: An Anthology of the Indian ­Labour Diaspora (London: Anthem Press, 2002), 226. 15. Gauitra Bahadur was herself critical to the translation pro­cess, using her own “knowledge of Guianese plantation terrain and vocabulary to make sense of details” ­others would not be familiar with. As she explains, her collaborators could not, for instance, be “expected to know that Manja was Guianese Creolese for plantation man­ ag­er and that Manja Darbar meant [the] man­ag­er’s ­table” (Gaiutra Bahadur, “Rescued from the Footnotes of History: Afterword,” in I Even Regret Night: Holi Songs of Demerara, trans. Rajiv Mohabir [Los Angeles, New York: Kaya Press, 2019], 180). 16. Quoted in Mishra, The Lit­er­a­ture of the Indian Diaspora, 41. 17. From Banarsi Chaturvedi, introduction to Totaram Sanadhya My 21 Years in Fiji (Varanasi, India: 1973), 12–24, qtd. in Twenty-­One Years, ed. and trans. John Kelly and Uttara Kumari Singh, 10. 18. The “line” refers to a row of com­pany housing for its laborers. ­A fter eight indigenous Fijian workers died t­ here, no one dared to live t­ here due to rumors that ghosts continued to haunt the place. Sanadhya was assigned to a room in this “haunted line” for the entirety of his five-­year indenture. 19. Lal and Yadav, “Hinduism u ­ nder Indenture,” 101. 20. It is ­later published in the Calcutta-­based newspaper Bharat Mi­tra. Lal and Yadav suggest that Sanadhya’s account of Kunti’s trou­ble is strategic in that it “probes the widely shared derogatory ste­reo­t ype of the Indian female worker as a ‘mercenary’ character who was responsible for all the major social and moral ills of the plantation society, such as suicide, murder, infant mortality and the general moral degradation of the Fiji Indian community [. . .] Kunti’s private cry was, in a very real sense, a protest against the veil of dishonour that Indian ­women wore, or rather ­were forced to wear, during their indenture on Fiji plantations” (Lal and Yadav, “Hinduism u ­ nder Indenture,” 197, 211). 21. A Calcutta-­based publication. 22. The missionary Charles Freer Andrews (1871–1940) was also affectionately known among Indians as “Dinbandhu” or “friend of the poor.” He was a close friend of M. K. Gandhi’s and traveled throughout the colonies as his emissary on behalf of India’s strug­ gle for in­de­pen­dence from British colonial rule. 23. Qtd. in Kelly 2003, 4–5, all emphases mine. 24. Sharma, Holi Songs, 195. 25. Brij V. Lal, Chalo Jahaji: On a Journey through Indenture in Fiji (Canberra, Australia: Australian National University, 2001), x. 26. In her afterword to the songbook, Bahadur explains that the mythical “chakora” bird is often presented as “feeding off moonbeams [. . .] The chakora is the figurative lover, and the moon, the beloved” (“Rescued from the Footnotes,” 181).

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chapter 2  — ­repatriation and the “indian prob­lem” in ismith khan’s the jumbie bird (1960) 1. A dif­fer­ent version of this chapter appears as “Contradictory Omens—­Repatriation and Re­sis­tance in Ismith Khan’s The Jumbie Bird,” in Beyond Windrush: Rethinking Post-­ War West Indian Lit­er­a­ture, eds. J. Dillon Brown and Leah Rosenberg (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press 2015), 21–52. 2. Samuel Selvon, Turn Again Tiger (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1959), 11–12. 3. Pathans, a minority community in Trinidad, are a nomadic warrior group who ­today live mostly in Pakistan and Af­ghan­i­stan. 4. Brij V. Lal, Chalo Jahanji: on a journey through indenture in Fiji. (Canberra, Australia: Australian National University, 2001), xi. 5. A quarter of the indenture population chose to repatriate, with the last voyage from Guyana to India taking place as late as 1955. 6. Ismith Khan, The Jumbie Bird (Essex, ­England: Longman 1985). 7. The 1857 Sepoy revolt in India is considered to be the first, before 1947, indigenous ­battle for colonial in­de­pen­dence. 8. The word itself, “Hindustan,” achieved currency during the Mughal era (1300–1854) to distinguish the religious difference between colonizer (Islamic Mughal) and colonized (Hindu). Even the writing of the constitution of modern “India” in 1948 was at pains to give the new country its own name and chose the indigenous “Bharat” from “Bharatvarsha,” referring to the empire of the mythological hero Bha­ra­ta found in Hindu and Jain scriptures (Ranbir Vohra, The Making of India: A Historical Survey [Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2001], 13–14). 9. As Patricia Mohammed points out, many indenture Indian Muslims came to the Ca­rib­bean from pre-­Partition India, and the “creation of two nations built on religious differences” on the Indian subcontinent helped to solidify “distinctions between the Islamic and Hindu populations in Trinidad without the acrimony and bloodshed that had taken place in India [in 1947].” Patricia Mohammed, “Island Currents, Global Aesthetics: Islamic Iconography in Trinidad,” in Islam in the Amer­i­c as, ed. Aisha Khan, 295–326 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2015), 310. 10. Arthur Drayton, “Ismith Khan,” in Fifty Ca­rib­bean Writers: A Bio-­Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook, ed. Daryl C. Dance (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986), 246–254. 11. When Jamaica, and then Trinidad, disbanded, some of the remaining islands tried to keep the Federation g­ oing by endeavoring to join with Canada’s own efforts to confederate within the British Commonwealth. Although the West Indies Federation fi­nally fell apart in 1965, one of its lasting legacies is the West Indies cricket team, which, though formed before the Federation, still plays u ­ nder the Federation flag. 12. Richard Allsopp and Jeanette Allsopp, Dictionary of Ca­r ib­bean Usage (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). 13. While sometimes referred to pejoratively as “black magic,” “witchcraft,” or “sor­ ere outlawed cery,” obeah involves religious practices of West African origins that w during colonialism. 14. Woodford Square was named a­ fter Ralph James Woodford who served as governor of Trinidad. Woodford was the first to suggest that indenture Indians be brought to Trinidad.

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15. Mohammed, “Island Currents,” 295, 296. 16. Aisha Khan, ed. Islam in the Amer­i­cas (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2015). 17. Frank Korom, Hosay Trinidad: Muharram Per­for­mances in an Indo-­Caribbean Diaspora (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003). 18. Mohammed, “Island Currents,” 313. 19. Shalini Puri, The Ca­rib­bean Postcolonial: Social Equality, Post-­Nationalism, and Cultural Hybridity (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 177 (original emphases). 20. Puri, The Ca­rib­bean Postcolonial, 178. 21. Kamau Brathwaite, Contradictory Omens: Cultural Diversity and Integration in the Ca­rib­be­an (Kingston, Jamaica: Savacou, 1974). 22. Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997). 23. Mahin Gosine, The Coolie Connection: From the Orient to the Occident (New York: Windsor Press, 1992), 17. 24. Kris Rampersad, Finding a Place: IndoTrinidadian Lit­er­a­ture (Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle, 2002), 7. 25. Clem Seecharan, ­Mother India’s Shadow over El Dorado: Indo-­Guyanese Politics and Identity 1890s–1930s (Kingston and Miami: Ian Randle, 2011), 257. 26. Seecharan, ­Mother India’s Shadow, 257. 27. As defined by its visionary founder, J. A. Luckhoo, the Indian colony in “British Guiana” was ­imagined as “India . . . ​stretch[ing] her hands across to us and try and help us and lift us up” (qtd. in Seecharan, ­Mother India’s Shadow, 261). 28. Seecharan, ­Mother India’s Shadow, 261. 29. Qtd. in Seecharan, ­Mother India’s Shadow, 260. 30. David Kimche, The Afro-­Asian Movement: Ideology and Foreign Policy of the Third World (Jerusalem: Israel University Press, 1973), 9. 31. Kimche, The Afro-­Asian Movement, 2. 32. Bandung is considered a natu­ral outcome of several interlinked events encompassing po­liti­cal uprisings across Asia, Africa, and the M ­ iddle East: The establishment of the Indian National Congress in 1885 and its counterpart the All-­India Muslim League in 1906; the convocation of the first Pan-­African Congress in 1900 and Arab Congress in 1913; the uprising of Asians against Occidentals, such as the “Boxer” rebellion in China in 1900 and the Japa­nese victory over Rus­sia in 1905—­a ll of ­these “evidenced a new awakening among the coloured p ­ eoples, the gathering momentum of ideas and emotions which w ­ ere to develop into national movements and fi­nally into sovereign nation-­states” (Kimche, The Afro-­Asian Movement, 1). 33. Carlos Romulo, The Meaning of Bandung (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1956). 34. Rampersad, Finding a Place, 13. 35. Brinsley Samaroo writes that Nehru, “as one of the found­ers of the non-­a ligned movement . . . ​felt obliged to advocate a larger solidarity than closer relations between ancestral ­mother and diasporic offspring. Additionally, Nehru had never had close involvement with diasporic communities. He therefore advised the Indian diaspora that they should not look to India for salvation.” Maurits Hassankhan, Lomarsh Roopnarine, and Han Ramsoedh, eds., The Legacy of Indian Indenture: Historical and Con­temporary Aspects of Migration and Diaspora (London: Routledge, 2016), 135.

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36. Patricia Mohammed qtd. in Rampersad, Finding a Place, 6. 37. Cabinet document, “Indian Communities in the Colonies: Memorandum by the Secretary of State for the Colonies,” January 20, 1955, 1–6, http://­filestore​.­nationalarchives​ .­gov​.­u k​/­pdfs​/l­ arge​/­cab​-­129​-­73​.­pdf.

chapter 3  — ­the trope of the ricefield in harold sonny ladoo’s no pain like this body (1972) Epigraph: Mahadai Das “They Came in Ships” (1998), in Creation Fire: A Cafra Anthology of Ca­r ib­bean ­Women’s Poetry, ed. Ramabai Espinet (Toronto: S­ ister Vision, 1990), 188–189. 1. Mariam Pirbhai, “Recasting Jahaji-­Bhain: Plantation History and the Indo-­Caribbean ­Women’s Novel in Trinidad, Guyana and Martinique,” in Critical Perspectives on Indo-­ Caribbean ­Women’s Lit­er­a­ture, eds. Joy Mahabir and Mariam Pirbhai (New York and London: Routledge, 2013), 25. 2. George Lamming, “The Indian Presence as a Ca­rib­bean Real­ity,” in Indenture and Exile, ed. Frank Birbalsingh (Toronto: TSAR Publications, 1989), 46. 3. George Lamming, “Ca­rib­bean L ­ abor, Culture, and Identity,” in Ca­rib­bean Cultural Identities, ed. Glyne Griffith (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2001), 20. This essay is a printed version of an address Lamming delivered at the Cave Hill campus in Barbados in 1994. 4. Lamming, “The Indian Presence,” 47, 54. 5. Harold Ladoo, No Pain Like This Body, 2nd ed., (1972; repr., Toronto: House of Anansi, 2003). Citations refer to the 2003 edition. 6. Dipesh Chakravorty, Provincializing Eu­rope: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2000). 7. Chakravorty, Provincializing Eu­rope, 72. 8. Chakravorty, Provincializing Eu­rope, 77. 9. Peter Such, “The Short Life and Sudden Death of Harold Ladoo,” originally published in BIM: Arts for the 21st ­Century 68 (1978). Accessed September 22, 2005, http://­w ww​ .­pancaribbean​.­com​/­ladoo​/­such​.­htm. 10. Roydon Salick, “The Bittersweet Comedy of Sonny Ladoo: A Reading of ‘Yesterdays,’ ” ARIEL 22, no. 3 (July 1991): 75–85; Clement H. Wyke, “Harold Ladoo’s Alternate Worlds: Canada and Carib Island,” Canadian Lit­er­a­ture, 95 (1982): 39–49. 11. Victor J. Ramraj, “Language and Perception: Reinstating the Individual in Postcolonial Literary Studies,” in Vernacular Worlds, Cosmopolitan Imagination, eds. Stephanos Stephanides and Stavros Karayanni (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill Rodopi, 2015), 165–182. 12. Daniel Balderston and Mike Gonzalez, eds., Encyclopedia of Latin American and Ca­rib­bean Lit­er­a­ture 1900–2003 (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), 826. 13. Dennis Lee, “The Death of Harold Ladoo,” Boundary 2 5, no. 1 (Autumn 1976): 215. 14. Lee, “The Death of Harold Ladoo,” 224. 15. Lee, “The Death of Harold Ladoo,” 213. 16. Victor Ramraj, “The Distinctive Indo-­Caribbean Art and Voice of Harold Sonny Ladoo,” The Arts Journal 6, no. 1/2 (2010): 51–60. 17. Ramraj, “The Distinctive Indo-­Caribbean.” 18. David Chariandy, Introduction to No Pain Like This Body (Toronto: House of Anansi, 2013); Reinhold Kramer, Scatology and Civility in the English-­Canadian Novel (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997).

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19. Wyke, “Ladoo’s Alternate Worlds”; Such, “The Short Life.” 20. Wyke, “Ladoo’s Alternate Worlds,” 42. 21. Wyke, “Ladoo’s Alternate Worlds,” 40 22. Wyke, “Ladoo’s Alternate Worlds,” 40. 23. Marina Car­ter and Khal Torabully, eds., Coolitude: An Anthology of the Indian ­Labour Diaspora (London: Anthem Press, 2002), 184. Torabully further explains that, Cabon “observed the villa­gers minutely, and learned much about their culture, at a time when the ‘Indians’ ­were thought of as negligible culturally. He even made a voyage to India, and not to Africa, the land of his ancestors, to learn more about the ­people he wrote about [. . .] In Cabon, we can say that the lit­er­a­ture of coolitude finds one of his noblest novelists, who was realistic enough to understand the social and po­liti­cal issues at stake” (185). 24. Smaro Kamboureli, ed. Making a Difference: Canadian Multicultural Lit­er­a­ture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 252. 25. I am referring ­here to an ­earlier writing tradition between 1960s and ‘70s in which Indo-­Guyanese writing was less widely known outside the region. The early writings of Peter Kempadoo, Rooplall Mohar, and Rajkumari Singh (all from Guyana) showed, in distinction from the more internationally known Indo-­Trinidadian writers of the period, greater attention to rural forms of Indian belonging, rural (Indian) cultural lives, and ethnic disparities. As Mariam Pirbhai notes, from the earliest book “in the form of Peter Kempadoo’s Guiana Boy [1960],” the “Indo-­Guyanese novel . . . ​has been largely concerned with the coastal community of Berbice county initially immortalized in [Edgar Mittelholzer’s] Corentyne Thunder [1941].” Mariam Pirbhai, Mythologies of Migration, Vocabularies of Indenture: Novels of the South Asian Diaspora in Africa, the Ca­rib­bean, and Asia-­Pacific (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), 106. By contrast, as I have suggested, Indo-­Trinidadian works have from the onset been more centered on urban and cosmopolitan themes. 26. Originally conceptualized in 2010, it was chosen to represent the Philippines in the Venice Art Biennial in 2017. 27. Leah Sandals, “Lani Meastro Bridges Bound­aries at the Venice Biennale,” Cana­ aestro​-v­ enice​-­biennale​/­. dian Art, May 11 2017, http://­canadianart​.c­ a​/­news​/­lani​-m 28. Robin Laurence, “Lani Maestro’s Site-­specific Exhibition, her rain, Speaks Eloquently to Its Location,” November 8, 2010, https://­w ww​.­straight​.­com​/­a rticle​-­357064​ /­v ancouver​ /­l ani​ -­m aestros​ -­s itespecific​ -­e xhibition​ -­h er​ -­r ain​ -­s peaks​ -­e loquently​ -­its​ -­location. 29. Dionne Brand, Introduction to Harold Ladoo, No Pain Like This Body (Toronto: House of Anansi, 2003). 30. Brand, Introduction to No Pain, xii. 31. Frank Birbalsingh, “Interview: David Dabydeen,” Kunapipi 12, no. 3 (1990): 104–120, https://­ro​.­uow​.­edu​.­au​/­cgi​/­v iewcontent​.c­ gi​?­article​=1­ 915&context​=k­ unapipi. In this interview, Dabydeen defines himself as a poet who is a three-­or four-­footed “creature,” an Anansi figure (a spider trickster figure in Ca­rib­bean folklore of West African origin) with one foot in Africa since his doctoral research was on the repre­sen­ta­tion of Africans in Western Art, one foot in India since he is Indo-­Guyanese, one foot in ­England where he lives and works, and one foot in South Amer­i­ca where Guyana is located. 32. Birbalsingh, “Interview,” 111. 33. Vijay Mishra, “The Girmit Ideology Revisited: Fiji Indian Lit­er­a­ture,” Reworlding: The Lit­er­a­ture of the Indian Diaspora, no. 42 (1992): 6.

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34. Pirbhai, “Recasting Jahaji-­Bhain,” 2, 29. 35. Lomarsh Roopnarine, Indo-­Caribbean Indenture: Re­sis­tance and Accommodation, 1838–1920 (Jamaica, Barbados, and Trinidad and Tobago: University of West Indies Press, 2007), 105. 36. Ramabai Espinet, “Repre­sen­ta­tion and the Indo-­Caribbean W ­ oman in Trinidad and Tobago,” in Indo-­Caribbean Re­sis­tance, ed. Frank Birbalsingh (Toronto: Mawenzi House, 1993), 42–61. 37. The Hindi word “jungli” or “junglee” refers to a person inhabiting the jungle and, by extension, symbolizes the uncouth or uncivilized. 38. Joy Mahabir and Mariam Pirbhai, “Introduction,” Critical Perspectives on Indo-­ Caribbean ­Women’s Lit­er­a­ture (New York: Routledge, 2013), 3. 39. Frank Birbalsingh, Jahaji. An Anthology of Indo-­Caribbean Fiction (Toronto: TSAR Publications, 2000). 40. Clem Seecharan, “Introduction,” in Joseph Ruhomon’s India: The Pro­gress of Her ­People at Home and Abroad, and How Th ­ ose in British Guiana May Improve Themselves. Introduced with notes and appendices by Clem Seecharan (Barbados: University of West Indies Press, 2001; first published Georgetown, British Guiana: C. K. Jardine, 1894), 2. Page references are to the 2001 edition. 41. Seecharan, Joseph Ruhomon’s India, 20–21. 42. Barton Schwartz, “Ritual Aspects of Caste in Trinidad,” Anthropological Quarterly 37, no. 1 (January 1964): 1–15. For instance, the “evil eye,” though also observed by Hindus, is commonly referred to as “maljeu” or “maljo” which is an appropriation of the Creole word derived from Spanish “mal-­de-­ojo” (11) and their belief in “sukuyans” (flying, blood-­sucking ­women), absent in traditional Hindu customs, evidence of a “syncretism of West African” belief in the soucayant and Eu­ro­pean “witches.” 43. Schwartz, “Ritual Aspects,” 14. 44. Lee-­Loy, Anne-­Marie. Searching for Mr. Chin: Constructions of Nation and the Chinese in West Indian Lit­er­a­ture (Philadelphia: T ­ emple University Press, 2010). 45. Lee-­Loy, Mr. Chin, 56–57. 46. Lee-­Loy, Mr. Chin, 50–51, 55. 47. Kenneth Ramchand, “West Indian Literary History: Literariness, Orality, and Periodization,” Callaloo 34 (Winter 1988): 104. 48. Selvon, Samuel. A Brighter Sun (Essex, ­England: Longman Group, 1995; first published in 1952), 117. Page references are to the 1995 edition. 49. Selvon, A Brighter Sun, 120. 50. Kris Rampersad, on the other hand, suggests that Selvon’s Moses trilogy, and in par­ tic­u ­lar the writer’s penchant for exposing the minutiae of Indian cultural life is more appropriately viewed from the fact that Selvon first entered writing as a journalist prior to becoming a fiction writer in ­England, then Canada (Kris Rampersad, Finding a Place: IndoTrinidadian Lit­er­a­ture [Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle, 2002]). 51. Ramchand, “West Indian Literary History,” 98. 52. Ramchand, “West Indian Literary History,” 98. 53. Leah Rosenberg, Nationalism and the Formation of Ca­rib­bean Lit­er­a­ture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 1. 54. See, for instance, Nicole King’s incisive reading of the male and class privileges undergirding some of the Ca­rib­be­an’s canonical writers such as C.L.R. James and Joseph Zobel in CLR James and Creolization: Circles of Influence (Jackson: University Press of

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Mississippi, 2001) and Zoran Pecic’s exposition of latent homophobia in Samuel Selvon in Queer Narratives of the Ca­rib­bean Diaspora: Exploring Tactics (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). Nicole King argues that James’s works never escape a certain patriarchal, bourgeois privilege, both the author’s and that of the presumed audience of his works. 55. Edward Kamau Brathwaite, LX, the Love Axe / I (Leeds: Peepal Tree, 2002), 32. 56. Brathwaite, Love Axe, 21. 57. Brathwaite, Love Axe, 27. 58. George Lamming, “The Pleasures of Exile,” The Tamarack Review: The West Indies. Issue Fourteen (Winter 1960): 56. 59. Lamming, “The Pleasures,” 46–47 (original italics). 60. Selwyn Cudjoe, Introduction to ­Those That Be in Bondage: A Tale of Indian Indentures and Sunlit Western ­Waters (Wellesley, MA: Calaloux, 1988), viii. 61. As Elizabeth DeLoughrey has suggested, “tropic figures of the contact zone such as the beach and plantation” are common in postcolonial island texts “concerned with a creolizing ‘tidalectic’ between land and sea” (“Island Writing, Creole Cultures,” in Cambridge History of Postcolonial Lit­er­a­ture, ed. Ato Quayson [Cambridge, UK:Cambridge University Press, 2012], 804), http://­w ww​.­english​.­ucla​.­edu​/­faculty​/­de​loughrey​/­DeLoughrey​ _­Island%20Writing, %20Creole%20Cultures_Cambridge%20Postcolonial%202011.pdf. 62. Das, “They Came in Ships.” 63. Qtd. in Walton Look Lai, “C.L.R. James and Trinidadian Nationalism,” in C. L. R. James’s Ca­rib­be­an, eds. Paget Henry and Paul Buhle (Durham: Duke University Press, 1992), 182. 64. Elizabeth DeLoughrey et  al., eds., Ca­r ib­bean Lit­er­a­ture and the Environment: Between Nature and Culture (University of V ­ irginia Press, 2005); Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (Routledge, 2007). 65. Bridget Breton, “Dif­fer­ent Trajectories of Freedom in the Anglophone Ca­rib­bean,” in Trajectories of Freedom: Ca­rib­bean Socie­ties, 1807–2007, eds. Alan Cobley and Victor C. Simpson (Kingston, Jamaica: University of West Indies Press, 2013), 13. 66. Breton, “Dif­fer­ent Trajectories,” 13. 67. Simon Gikandi, Slavery and the Culture of Taste (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2011), 236. 68. Gikandi, Slavery and the Culture, 236. 69. Gikandi, Slavery and the Culture, 242–243. 70. Gikandi, Slavery and the Culture, 242, 264. 71. Frank Birbalsingh, ed., Frontiers of Ca­rib­bean Lit­er­a­ture in En­glish (Warwick University Ca­rib­bean Studies. London: Macmillan Education, 1996). 72. Sean Lokaisingh-­Meighoo, “The Diasporic Mo(ve)ment: Indentureship and Indo-­ Caribbean Identity,” in Nation Dance: Religion, Identity, and Cultural Difference in the Ca­rib­be­an, ed. Patrick Taylor (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2001), 186. It is estimated that close to one-­t hird of Trinidad’s Indian community (which makes for forty-­nine ­percent of its total population) sought refuge in North Amer­i­ca, Eu­rope, and other Ca­rib­bean islands during the po­liti­cally charged race riots that swept Trinidad and Guyana during the 1950s and 1960s (the de­cades preceding In­de­pen­dence), which had effects on both Indian and African communities. Indian emigration and expatriation soared in a de­cade (the 1970s) marked by local ethnic tensions (David Dabydeen and Brinsley Samaroo, eds., Across the Dark ­Waters: Ethnicity and Indian Identity in the

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Ca­rib­be­an [London: Macmillan, 1996]; Frank Birbalsingh, From Pillar to Post: The Indo-­ Caribbean Diaspora [Toronto: TSAR, 1997]). 73. As Richard Allsopp suggests, the naming of the Ca­rib­bean has subjected the entire region to “a ­mistake.” In the first case, the word Ca­rib­bean, he argues, “was constructed to sound like the word ‘Eu­ro­pean,’ as opposed to ‘Cariban.’ ” It was once called the “West Indies” but then further split depending on language: called “Las Antillas” (from the Portuguese) by the Spanish to refer to the mythical islands of the Atlantic Ocean; this word turned into “Les Antilles” by the French, which the British took and imposed the final split into the Lesser and Greater Antilles (2001, 33). Additionally, the term “Carib Indian” is used indiscriminately, thereby erasing the dif­fer­ent groups most aggressively attacked ­under conquest and colonization. Richard Allsopp, “Ca­rib­bean Identity and Belonging,” in Ca­rib­bean Cultural Identities, ed. Griffith, Glyne (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2001), 33–54. 74. As Alonso argues, especially insofar as so-­called “autochthonist” authors, in such classic works as Doña Bárbara (Rómulo Gallegos 1929), La Vorágine (The Vortex, José Ěustasîo Rivera 1924), and Don Segundo Sombra (Ricardo Güiraldes 1926), ­were making claims for a p ­ eople still being colonized, the writers’ cultural remove from and disregard for the Indigenous was evident. 75. Aliyah Khan, “Indigeneity and the Indo-­Caribbean in Cyril Dabydeen’s Dark Swirl,” Studies in Canadian Lit­er­a­ture 40, no. 1 (2015), https://­journals​.­lib​.u ­ nb​.­ca​/­index​.­php​/­SCL​ /­article​/­v iew​/­24288​/­28091. 76. Shona Jackson, Creole Indigeneity: Between Myth and Nation in the Ca­rib­be­an (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 211. As Jackson clarifies, all and e­ very iteration of belongingness and indigeneity asserted through ties with the land come at the cost of the constant elision and displacement of native p ­ eoples’ rights in the Ca­rib­ bean, in par­tic­u ­lar Guyana and Suriname, in what she calls the “lingering coloniality of belonging in postcolonial Creole socie­ties” (2012, 5–6). 77. A. K. Ramanujan, “Three Hundred Ramayanas: Five Examples and Three Thoughts on Translation,” in The Collected Essays of A. K. Ramanujan, ed. Vinay Dharwadker (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999), 149. 78. Ramanujan, “Three Hundred Ramayanas,” 155. 79. Sherry-­Ann Singh, The Ramayana Tradition and Socio-­Religious Change in Trinidad 1917–1990 (Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle, 2012). 80. ­Because “Sita” means “furrow,” Ramanujan adds, Sita is like a “seed” returned to the earth ­a fter a brief period of time spent with Rama whose cloud-­dark body symbolizes rain (Ramanujan, “Three Hundred Ramayanas, 150). 81. Singh, The Ramayana Tradition, 136. 82. As Lindsey Phillips (2012) argues, geophagy (the practice of dirt eating) demonstrates both an “assertion of power by the enslaved p ­ eople who engaged in it, as well as medical documentation of their humanity [. . .] Dirt-­eating among the enslaved confounded eighteenth-­century physicians, leading them to position geophagy as a disease—­one without an explanation or easy cure. Therefore, in consuming dirt, the enslaved exhibited a type of agency, one that revealed the colonizers’ inability to control their minds” (76). Edible Economies and Tasteful Rhe­toric: Diet in the Transatlantic World During the Long Eigh­teenth ­Century, Electronic ­Theses, Treatises and Dissertations, Florida State University Libraries, https://­fsu​.­digital​.­flvc​.­org​/­islandora​/­object​/­fsu:183578​

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/­datastream​/­PDF​/­v iew. Some of the colonizer’s cures w ­ ere draughts (some of which contained shaved steel and ­bitter, iron mouth-­locks (which also prevented them from eating anything e­ lse), placement in the stocks, and decapitation, all punishments also used to threaten slaves into subservience.

chapter 4  —  (en)gendering indenture in shani mootoo’s cereus blooms at night (1992) 1. Shani Mootoo, Cereus Blooms at Night (Vancouver, Canada: Press Gang Publishers, 1996). 2. Mariam Pirbhai, “The Jahaji-­Bhain Princi­ple: A Critical Survey of the Indo-­Caribbean ­Women’s Novel, 1990–2009,” Journal of Commonwealth Lit­er­a­tures 45, no. 1 (2010): 38. 3. Quoted in Rhoda Reddock, “Diversity, Difference and Ca­r ib­bean Feminism: The Challenge of Anti-­Racism,” Ca­rib­bean Review of Gender Studies 1 (April 2007): 16, https://­ sta​.­uwi​.­edu​/­crgs​/­april2007​/­journals​/­Diversity​-­Feb​_­2007​.­pdf. 4. Gabrielle Hosein, “Modern Navigations: Indo-­Trinidadian Girlhood and Gender-­ Differential Creolization,” Ca­rib­bean Review of Gender Studies 6 (2012): 9, https://­sta​.­uwi​ .­edu​/­crgs​/­march2013​/­journals​/­Hosein​.­pdf. 5. See Tejaswini Niranjana, “ ‘Left to the Imagination’: Indian Nationalisms and Female Sexuality in Trinidad,” Public Culture 11, no. 1 (1999): 223–243; and Gayatri Gopinath, Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005). 6. Dianne Wells, Between Difference: Trinidadian ­Women’s Collective Action. Doctoral dissertation, New York University, 2000, 190, qtd. in Reddock, “Ca­rib­bean Feminism,” 16. 7. Alison Donnell, Twentieth-­Century Ca­rib­bean Lit­er­at­ ure: Critical Moments in Anglophone Literary History (London: Routledge, 2006), 8. 8. Jeremy Poynting, “ ‘You Want to Be a Coolie ­Woman?’: Gender and Ethnic Identity in Indo-­Caribbean ­Women’s Writing,” in Ca­rib­bean ­Women Writers: Essays from the First International Conference, ed. Selwyn Cudjoe (Wellesley, MA: Calaloux, 1990), 98. 9. Kris Rampersad, Finding a Place: IndoTrinidadian Lit­er­a­ture (Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle, 2002). 10. Gabrielle Hosein and Lisa Outar, eds. Indo-­Caribbean Feminist Thought: Genealogies, Theories, Enactments (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 3. 11. Joy Mahabir and Mariam Pirbhai, eds. Critical Perspectives on Indo-­Caribbean ­Women’s Lit­er­a­ture (New York: Routledge, 2013), 4. 12. Brinda Mehta, Diasporic (Dis)locations: Indo-­Caribbean ­Women Writers Negotiate the Kala Pani (Jamaica: University of West Indies Press, 2004), 1. 13. Mehta, Diasporic (Dis)locations, 1–2, 3. 14. Mehta, Diasporic (Dis)locations, 29 (emphasis mine). 15. Mehta, Diasporic (Dis)locations, 4 (emphasis mine). 16. Mehta, Diasporic (Dis)locations, 39. 17. In her acclaimed essay, “I am a Coolie” (published in 1973), Singh writes about the need to “re-­t hink” a word that “[e]ven Indo-­Guyanese use . . . ​to denigrate one another.” The word must be given “a new lease of life,” she suggests, in order to honor the suffering and t­ rials of the ancestors: “Not only in the Guyana context must COOLIE be given new meaning, but in e­ very land of the Ca­rib­bean Sea, the Indian Ocean, the seas of the East, in Africa and Eu­rope. Proclaim the word! Identify with the word!” (Alison Don-

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nell and Sarah Lawson, eds., The Routledge Reader in Ca­rib­bean Lit­er­a­ture [London and New York: Routledge: 1996], 352–353). 18. Mehta, Diasporic (Dis)locations, 40. 19. Mahabir and Pirbhai, Critical Perspectives, 25 (emphasis mine). 20. Hosein and Outar, Indo-­Caribbean Feminist Thought, 9. 21. Mariam Pirbhai, “Recasting Jahaji-­Bhain: Plantation History and the Indo-­ Caribbean ­Women’s Novel in Trinidad, Guyana and Martinique,” in Critical Perspectives on Indo-­Caribbean ­Women’s Lit­er­a­ture, eds. Joy Mahabir and Mariam Pirbhai, 25–47 (London: Routledge, 2013), 5, 37. 22. Pirbhai, “Jahaji-­Bhain Princi­ple,” 28, 53. 23. Denise Narain, Alison Donnell and Evelyn O’Callaghan, “Shani Mootoo: Writing, Difference and the Ca­rib­bean,” Journal of West Indian Lit­er­a­ture 19, no. 2 (April 2011): 1. 24. Narain, Donnell, and O’Callaghan, “Shani Mootoo,” 4. 25. Narain, Donnell, and O’Callaghan, “Shani Mootoo,” 2. 26. Pirbhai, “Recasting Jahaji-­Bhain.” 27. Benedict Ledent, Evelyn O’Callaghan, and Daria Tunca, eds. Madness in Anglophone Ca­rib­bean Lit­er­at­ ure: On the Edge (New York: Palgrave, 2018), 6. 28. “Caliban’s D ­ aughter” was published in honor of Dominican author Jean Rhys. Cliff claims that her own writing has aspired to what was achieved in Wide Sargasso Sea (1966). Michelle Cliff, “Caliban’s D ­ aughter,” Journal of Ca­rib­bean Lit­er­a­tures 3, no. 3 (Summer 2003): 157. 29. Cliff, “Caliban’s D ­ aughter,” 157. 30. Cliff, “Caliban’s D ­ aughter,” 158. 31. Cliff, “Caliban’s ­Daughter,” 157. 32. Cliff, “Caliban’s ­Daughter,” 159 (original italics). 33. Ramabai Espinet, “Repre­sen­ta­tion and the Indo-­Caribbean ­Woman,” in Indo-­ Caribbean Re­sis­tance, ed. Frank Birbalsingh, 42–61 (Toronto: Mawenzi House, 1993), 43. 34. Marina Car­ter, Voices from Indenture: Experiences of Indian Mi­grants in the British Empire (London and New York: Leicester University Press, 1996), 140. 35. Mahabir and Pirbhai, Critical Perspectives, 2. 36. Car­ter, Voices from Indenture, 146. Thus, Marina Car­ter argues, the following comment ascribed to an Indian ­woman by Sarah Morton, the wife of John Morton, the first Canadian Presbyterian missionary to Trinidad, went unchallenged: “when the last ship came in I took a Papa. I w ­ ill keep him as long as he treats me well. If he does not treat me well I s­ hall send him off at once.” Through repetition, Car­ter asserts, this phrase was used to create a ste­reo­t yped “depiction of w ­ omen u ­ nder indenture.” 37. Partha Chatterjee, “Colonialism, Nationalism, and Colonialized ­Women: The Contest in India,” American Ethnologist 16, no. 4 (November 1989): 625, https://­w ww​.­jstor​ .­org​/­stable​/­645113. 38. Chatterjee, “Colonialism,” 627. 39. Niranjana, “Left to the Imagination,” 232. 40. Niranjana, “Left to the Imagination,” 233. 41. Tejaswini Niranjana. Mobilizing India: ­Women, ­Music, and Migration Between India and Trinidad (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 237. 42. Rhoda Reddock, “Freedom Denied: Indian ­Women and Indentureship in Trinidad and Tobago, 1845–1917,” Economic and Po­liti­cal Weekly 20, no. 43 (October 26, 1985): 79.

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43. Reddock, “Freedom Denied,” 80. 44. Car­ter, Voices from Indenture, 137. 45. Olive Se­nior, Arrival of the Snake-­Woman and Other Stories (London: Longman Ca­rib­bean Writers, 1989), 3. 46. Mehta, Diasporic (Dis)locations. 47. The colonialist under­pinnings of “arrival,” as discussed in the Introduction and Conclusion, continue to be an impor­tant issue in Indo-­Caribbean postcolonial negotiations of cultural agency and po­liti­c al identity. Though it primarily signals trou­ble in Se­nior’s story of colonial times, I argue that the meaning and significance of “arrival’ in indenture continues to inflect the themes of exile and belongingness in Indo-­Caribbean cultural expression. 48. A flower “mala,” or garland, is usually offered to deities during religious ceremonies. 49. Hugh Tinker, The Banyan Tree: Overseas Emigrants from India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh (Oxford University Press, 1977), 58. 50. Jeremy Poynting, “Seeing with Other Eyes: Reflections on Christian Proselytization in Indo-­Caribbean Fiction,” Kunapipi 8, no. 2 (1986): 97, 98, https://­ro​.­uow​.­edu​.­au​ /­kunapipi​/­vol8​/­iss2​/­16. 51. Brinsley Samaroo, “The Presbyterian Canadian Mission as an Agent of Integration in Trinidad during the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries,” Ca­rib­bean Studies, 14, no. 4 (January 1975): 51. 52. The Naparima Girls’ school was the first institution to offer girls any kind of schooling, education having been typically withheld and/or denied to them by their own community. It was also the first to offer a curriculum at par with the one provided to men at Naparima College (founded by the missionary K. J. Grant in 1870). In a speech given in 2002, Kamala Persad-­Bissessar, Trinidad and Tobago’s first female Prime Minister, connected her success to the “Naparima tradition” and the role education played in ensuring Indian w ­ omen’s liberation and autonomy. Persad-­Bissessar, leader of the United National Congress, served as Prime Minister from 2010 to 2015. 53. Reddock, “Freedom Denied,” 85. 54. Patricia Mohammed, “Stories in Ca­rib­bean Feminism: Reflections on the Twentieth ­Century,” Ca­rib­bean Review of Gender Studies, no. 9 (2015): 111–142. This essay is a transcript of Mohammed’s Keynote Address at the fifth anniversary of the Center for Gender and Development Studies at the University of West Indies, Mona Campus, Jamaica, in 1998. 55. As noted by Clem Seecharan, Chris­tian­ity in the Ca­rib­bean carries with it its own “creole assumptions of superiority” and thus possibly “a threat to Indian identity” in so far as this is re-­membered through associations with the past and the ancestral land of India (Clem Seecharan, “Introduction,” in Joseph Ruhomon’s India: The Pro­gress of Her ­People at Home and Abroad, and How Th ­ ose in British Guyana May Improve Themselves. Introduced with notes and appendices by Clem Seecharan [Barbados: University of West Indies Press, 2001; first published Georgetown, British Guiana: C. K. Jardine, 1894], 17). 56. Brinsley Samaroo, “Recharging the Ancestral Battery: Physical and Spiritual Return to Bharat Mata,” in Legacy of Indian Indenture, eds. Maurits Hassankhan, Lomarsh Roopnarine, and Han Ramsoedh (London: Routledge, 2016), 132. 57. Kazim M. Bacchus, Education as and for Legitimacy: Developments in West Indian Education between 1846–1895 (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1994), 218. 58. Samaroo, “The Presbyterian Canadian,” 41, 48.

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59. Bacchus, Education, 68. 60. Samaroo, “The Presbyterian Canadian,” 6. Very few did actually leave. Between 1851 to 1911, years that bookend the beginning and end of indenture, the population of Indians in Trinidad ­rose from 68,600 to 312,790, that is, 35.42 % of the total population (Samaroo, “The Presbyterian Canadian,” 41), and ward schools (­free government-­sponsored establishments) that w ­ ere available to Indians ­were held in suspicion by parents who did not want their c­ hildren to come ­under the influence of cultural ­others. 61. Samaroo, “The Presbyterian Canadian,” 311. 62. Samaroo, “The Presbyterian Canadian,” 52. 63. Poynting, “Seeing with Other Eyes,” 106. 64. Poynting, “Seeing with Other Eyes,” 106. 65. Roseanne Kanhai, ed., “Matikor”: The Politics of Identity for Indo-­Caribbean ­Women (St. Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago: University of West Indies Press, 1999), 22. 66. Evelyn O’Callaghan, “ ‘Compulsory Heterosexuality’ and Textual/Sexual Alternatives in Selected Texts by West Indian ­Women Writers,” in Ca­rib­bean Portraits, ed. Christine Barrow (Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle, 1998), 304. 67. Robert Gougeon’s interview with Shani Mootoo on the publication of He Drown She in the Sea. The Writer’s Cafe (blog), 2005, http://­w riterscafe​.­ca​/ ­book​_­blogs​/­w riters​ /­shani​-­mootoo​_ ­he​-­drown​-s­ he​-­in​-­t he​-­sea​.­html. 68. “Dear Shani, Hiya Richard: A Dialogue by/with Richard Fung and Shani Mootoo,” Felix: A Journal of Media Arts and Communication, no. 4 (1995), http://­w ww​.­e​-­felix​.­org​ /­issue4​/­shani​.­html. 69. Caryn Rae Adams, “In Her Own Words: Shani Mootoo on Migration, Writing and the ­Human Spirit,” Journal of West Indian Lit­er­a­ture 19, no. 2 (2011): 102, 103. 70. Adams, “Her Own Words,” 102. 71. Adams, “Her Own Words,” 103.

conclusion 1. David Dabydeen, Maria del Pilar Kaladeen, and Tina K. Ramnarine, eds., We Mark Your Memory: Writing from the Descendants of Indenture (School of Advanced Study, University of London, 2018). Published on the centenary of the end of indenture, 2. Dabydeen, Kaladeen, and Ramnarine, We Mark Your Memory, xi. 3. Dabydeen, Kaladeen, and Ramnarine, We Mark Your Memory, xi. 4. Frank Birbalsingh, Indo-­Caribbean Re­sis­tance (Toronto: Mawenzi House, 1993), viii. 5. Patricia Mohammed, “The Point of No Return: Wendy Nanan as Postindenture Indian Female Visionary Artist,” Small Axe 21, no. 2 (July 2017): 72. Mohammed’s essay includes Nanan’s comments from personal communications and interviews. 6. Patricia Mohammed, director, Coolie Pink and Green, 2009, https://­w ww​.­culture​ unplugged​.­com​/­storyteller​/­Patricia​_ ­Mohammed#​/­myFilms. 7. Indian Arrival Day, or its equivalent, is celebrated in several locations throughout the indenture diaspora, most notably in Fiji (as Girmit Remembrance Day), Grenada, Guyana, Jamaica (as Indian Heritage Day), Mauritius, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Suriname, and Trinidad and Tobago. 8. See, for instance, Kalpana Kannabiran, “Mapping Migration, Gender, Culture and Politics in the Indian Diaspora: Commemorating Indian Arrival in Trinidad,” Economic and Po­liti­cal Weekly, 33, no. 44 (October 31–­November 6, 1998): 53–58, http://­w ww​.­jstor​ .­org​/­stable​/­4 407325. Through her fieldwork study, Kannabiran discussses the heated

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debates surrounding the commemoration of Indian Arrival Day as a public holiday in Trinidad and Tobago in 1945, a year marking 150 years since the arrival of the first boat of indentured laborers (the Fateh Razek). 9. Qtd. in Lindsey Harlan, “Indian Arrival Day: Shifting Bound­aries in the Cele­bration of a National Holiday in Trinidad,” in Lines in ­Water: Religious Bound­aries in South Asia, eds. Eliza Kent and Tazim Kassam (New York: Syracuse University Press, 2013), 361, https://­w ww​.­jstor​.­org​/­stable​/­j​.­ctt1j1w03z​.1­ 8. 10. Bridgemohan 1995, qtd. in Kannabiran, “Mapping Migration,” 55. 11. Harlan, “Indian Arrival Day,” 357. 12. Mohammed, “The Point of No Return,” 72. 13. Rajiv Mohabir, “Why I ­Will Never Celebrate Indian Arrival Day,” Margins, June 2, 2016, https://­aaww​.­org​/­indian​-a­ rrival​-­day​/­. Shona Jackson has also argued that the institutionalization of Indian Arrival Day, making it a national holiday, “implicitly challenges the po­liti­c al right blacks claim from having constructed themselves as more legitimate inheritors of the nation than both indigenous ­peoples and Indians [. . .] Indian Arrival Day secures the narrative of having ‘rescued’ the colony ­a fter emancipation.” Shona Jackson, Creole Indigeneity: Between Myth and Nation in the Ca­rib­be­an (University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 110. 14. Andil Gosine, “­A fter Indenture,” Small Axe: A Ca­rib­bean Journal of Criticism 21, no. 2 (2017): 63, 66, https://­read​.­dukeupress​.­edu​/­small​-a­ xe​/­article​-­abstract​/­21​/­2%20(53)​/6­ 3​ /­129676​/­A fter​-­Indenture. 15. Patricia Mohammed, “Writing Gender into History: The Negotiation of Gender Relations among Indian Men and ­Women in Post-­Indenture Trinidad Society, 1917–47,” in Engendering History: Ca­rib­bean ­Women in Historical Perspective, eds. Verene Shepherd, Bridget Brereton and Barbara Bailey, 20–47 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995), 57. According to Mohammed, “the 150-­year-­old brotherhood of jahajis, with its history of diversity and multiculturalism is now being bombarded with the image and rhe­toric of the ‘Global Brotherhood of Saffron’ [such that] the dominant discourse on Indian Arrival [amongst Indians] is within frameworks of Hinduism” (57). 16. Kannabiran, “Mapping Migration,” 57. 17. Selwyn Cudjoe, Indian Time Ah Come in Trinidad and Tobago (Trinidad and Tobago: Calaloux, 2010). 18. Cudjoe, Indian Time, xi. 19. Glenn Roopchand self-­identifies as “East Indian, African and Carib” and is vocal about his pride in being a “dougla,” viewing his mixed ancestry as an artistic and po­liti­ cal opportunity to “open his soul to see his environment in vari­ous mythological ways” (Cudjoe, Indian Time, x). 20. Cudjoe, Indian Time, xiii. 21. Gosine, “­A fter Indenture,” 64. 22. Gosine, “­A fter Indenture,” 63. 23. Mohammed, “The Point of No Return,” 70–71. 24. Mohammed, “The Point of No Return,” 80. 25. Krishna, one incarnation of Vishnu, is an im­mensely popu­lar Hindu god who, as a child, reveled in pranks. He is usually depicted as blue, which was supposedly from a snake bite, though in Hindu my­thol­ogy this also connotes his divine immortality. Nanan’s Baby Krishna is a series of re­imagined “Krishnas” comprising transcultural symbolisms.

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26. Doubles is a popu­lar street food in Trinidad and Tobago inspired by Indian cuisine that consists of two flat breads (or rotis) filled with chickpeas and accompanied by chutneys. 27. Mohammed, “The Point of No Return,” 70. 28. ­Every exhibition piece in Books and Stupas (a stupa is a Buddhist shrine) resembles an open book in which images/words on ­either leaf converge on a single idea or theme. The series also gestures to the Bookman tradition in Trinidadian carnival, a figure performing the act of writing in a book while tallying ­peoples’ sins and misdeeds. 29. Mohammed, “The Point of No Return,” 77. 30. Mohammed, “The Point of No Return,” 77. 31. Mohammed, “The Point of No Return,” 80. 32. Andil Gosine, “Visual Art a­ fter Indenture: Authoethnographic Reflections,” South Asian Studies 33, no. 1 (March 21, 2017): 105. 33. Gosine, “Visual Art,” 107. 34. Sections within this installation include the use of art objects specific to indenture, such as the cutlass, ohrni (­women’s head covering), and rum and roti. 35. Gosine, “Visual Art,” 105. 36. Gosine, “Visual Art,” 107 (original emphases). 37. Gosine, “Visual Art,” 107. 38. Gosine, “­A fter Indenture,” 66. 39. Brij V. Lal, Mr. Tulsi’s Store: A Fijian Journey (Canberra, Australia: The Australian National University, 2001). 40. In their book The South African Gandhi: Stretcher ­Bearer of Empire (2015) for instance, Vahed and Desai argue that nomenclatures such as “bapu” (­father) and the “mahatma” (­great soul) continue to memorialize Gandhi in unidimensional ways that obscure the foundational South Africa years, in par­tic­u ­lar his complicated involvement with (ex)indentured Indians in South Africa. Redetermining indenture’s shaping role in Gandhi’s anticolonialism and, by extension, the limits of Gandhian satyagraha, Vahed and Desai trace the deeply troubling complications in this iconic figure’s journey from an enthusiastic “stretcher-­bearer of empire” into the mahatma (­great soul) who championed for the end of the indenture. 41. Goolam Vahed and Ashwin Desai, “Indian Indenture: Speaking Across the Oceans,” Man in India 92, no. 2 (April 2012): 195. 42. Gabrielle Hosein and Lisa Outar, eds. Indo-­Caribbean Feminist Thought: Genealogies, Theories, Enactments (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 110. 43. Lal, Mr. Tulsi’s Store, 105. 44. Lal, Mr. Tulsi’s Store, 107, 108. 45. S. Prasannarajan, “Literary Festival: Delhi to See First Mega Cele­bration of Imagining India,” India ­Today, June 4, 2001 (emphases mine), http://­i ndiatoday​.­i ntoday​.­i n​ /­story​/­literary​-­festival​-­delhi​-­to​-­see​-­first​-­mega​-­celebration​-­of​-­imagining​-­india​/­1​/­232271​ .­html. 46. “Speech of Prime Minister Shri Atal Bihari Vajpayee Inauguration of the International Festival of Indian Lit­er­a­ture—­At Home in the World,” https://­archivepmo​.n ­ ic​.­in​ /­abv​/­speech​-d ­ etails​.­php​?n ­ odeid​= ­9025, February 18, 2002. 47. “Speech of Prime Minister Shri Atal Bihari.” 48. S. Prasannarajan, “Literary Festival.”

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49. S. Prasannarajan, “V. S. Naipaul plays spoilsport at international festival of Indian lit­er­a­t ure,” India ­Today, March 11, 2002, http://­i ndiatoday​.­i ntoday​.­i n​/­story​/­vs​-­naipaul​ -­plays​-­spoilsport​-a­ t​-i­ nternational​-­festival​-­of​-i­ ndian​-­literature​/­1​/­221410​.­html. 50. Sanjeeb Mukherjee, “ ‘At Home in the World’: A Homecoming for Language Writers,” the​-­south​-­asian​.­com, April 2002, http://­w ww​.­the​-­south​-­asian​.­com​/­april2002​/­Book​ _­Review​_­At​_­Home​_­in​_­t he​_­World​.­htm. 51. Girish Karnad, “Why Has Naipaul Been Honoured?,” Outlook, November 2, 2012, http://­w ww​.­outlookindia​.­com​/a­ rticle​/­Why​-­Has​-N ­ aipaul​-­Been​-­Honoured​/­282853. At the same event, Karnad notes that it has always been the explic­itly “anti-­Muslim” tenor of Naipaul’s works on India that won him so much regard among (some) Indians. 52. Farookh Dhondy, “Interview with V. S. Naipaul,” Literary Review 2001, https://­ literaryreview​.­co​.­u k ​/­a n​-­interview​-­w ith​-­v​-­s​-­naipaul.

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Index

abduction narratives, 19 Abrahams, Roger, 29 acculturation, 9, 29, 31, 84, 114 Af­ghan­i­stan, 77, 189n3 Africa: fear of Indian domination in, 93; Indian indentured workers in, 13, 89; Indians in decolonization period, 46 African cultures, 4, 31; Africanist cultures, 4, 19, 29, 35; Anansi spider trickster figure, 192n31; as “universalistic,” 4; Yoruba slaves, 42 Afrocentrism, 30, 32, 74, 79 “­A fter Indenture” (Gosine, ed.), 161 agency, 6, 18, 48; African-­Indian alliances and, 38; “arrival” discourse and, 160; cultural, 198n47; gender and, 132; geophagy and, 195n82; subaltern, 20, 35 All-­India Muslim League, 190n32 Allsopp, Richard, 195n73 Alonso, Carlos, 121, 195n74 ambivalence, 2, 74, 98, 119, 124 Andaman and Nicobar Islands, 24 Andhra Pradesh (Indian state), 13 Andrews, Charles Freer, 63, 64, 188n22 arkatiyas (indenture recruiters), 15, 58 “arrival” discourse, 2, 48, 146, 150, 157, 158; belonging and, 164–165; colonialist legacies and, 159; Indian Arrival Day, 159–160, 199n7; “Kamla moment” in Trinidad, 161 “Arrival of the Snake ­Woman” (Se­nior, 1989), 145–146, 198n47 “Art a­ fter Indenture” (Gosine), 162 Asians, 5, 31, 178n46; erasure from Creole identity, 30; tension with Africans, 160

assimilation, 10, 12, 39, 73, 114; Christian conversion and, 150, 152; negative, 130; re­sis­tance to, 11 Atala (Chateaubriand, 1801), 22 At Home in the World: A Homecoming for Language Writers (2002), 168 “At Home in the World” lit­er­a­ture festival (New Dehli, 2002), 167–168 Austen, Jane, 104 Australia, 19, 61 Awadhi language, 55 Baby Krishna series (Nanan), 162, 200n25 Bacchus, Kazim M., 151 Bahadur, Gaiutra, 19, 55, 188n15, 188n26 Baldwin, James, 34 Bandung conference (1955), 91, 190n32 Bangladesh, 77 banya caste, 24 Barbados, 101 Beckett, Samuel, 104 Behn, Aphra, 22 belonging/belongingness, 11, 20, 41, 130, 169; “arrival” idea and, 157; arrival/ return narratives and, 164–165; to “Bharat-­mata” (­mother India), 24; creolization and, 87, 146; cultural “passing” and, 147; despair as affective medium of, 70; dialecticism of being and belonging, 45; gendered, 9; gender-­inclusive perspective on, 132; hybridity and, 121; idea of return and, 48; indigeneity and, 29; intercultural integration and, 113; ­labor relations excluded from, 108; native identity and,

221

222 i n d e x belonging/belongingness (continued) 28; repatriation as destructive to, 46; rural Ca­rib­bean as foundational space of, 102; Trinidad versus India as site of, 98 Bengal Province (British India), 13, 15, 41 Benítez-­Rojo, Antonio, 84 Bernabé, Jean, 31 Bhabha, Homi, 38, 111 bhak­ti (devotional) genre, 51, 65 Bhojpuri language, 25, 55; in Ladoo’s No Pain Like This Body, 108; in Sharma’s Holi Songs, 67, 68 Bhut Len Ki Katha: Totaram Sanadkhya Ka Fiji. See Story of the Haunted Line, The: Totaram Sanadhya’s Fiji (Sanadhya, 1922) Bihar (Indian state), 13, 41, 184n166 Bindi: The Multi-­Faceted Lives of Indo-­Caribbean ­Women (Kanhai, 2011), 134 Birbalsingh, Frank, 26, 32, 53, 120, 158 Bissoondath, Neil, 111 Black Atlantic, The (Gilroy, 1994), 35 “Black” category/“Blackness,” 33, 36; caste and, 63; diasporic identity and, 35; Indo-­Trinidadian self-­identification as, 37 Black Jacobins, The (James, 1938), 32 Black Power movement (1960s–1970s), 37, 38 Black Skin, White Masks (Fanon, 1952), 33 Bones (Das, 1988), 134 Books and Stupas (Nanan, 2012), 162–163, 201n28 Brahmin (priestly) caste, 13, 23, 186n187, 187n2; bhak­ti poets and, 51; “true” Brahmins, 124. See also caste Braithwaite, Lloyd, 4 Braj Bhasa (medieval poetic language), 55 Brand, Dionne, 107, 130 Brathwaite, Edward Kamau, 4, 5, 28, 73; on anticolonial re­sis­tance, 83; on creation of Indo-­Caribbean category, 99; “creoleness” and, 31; on creolization, 84; on “failure” aesthetics, 117; on “Indo-­Creole” identity, 84; pessimism of, 116 Breton, Bridget, 119 Bridgemohan, Sita, 159 Brighter Sun, A (Selvon, 1952), 114, 115, 116 British Ca­rib­bean Federation Act (1956), 80 British Empire, 13, 63

British Guiana, 13, 53, 65; fears of East Indian Empire in, 93; proposal for Indian colony within, 90. See also Demerara; Guyana British Indian Organ­ization, 60 British Raj, 10, 46, 79, 91, 177n34 British West Indies, 14 Brontë, Charlotte, 141 Butterfly in the Wind (Persaud, 1990), 134 Cabon, Marcel, 105, 192n23 Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (Césaire), 31, 32 Cale d’Etoiles Coolitude (Torabully), 1, 33, 55, 136 “Caliban’s ­Daughter” (Cliff, 2003), 140–141, 197n28 calypso, 175n1, 177n43 Canada, 104, 106–107, 133, 153, 164; Canadian Presbyterian Mission, 42, 138, 148, 151, 197n36; as home of largest Indo-­Caribbean diaspora, 151 canons, literary, 17, 104, 108, 134, 156 capitalism, 5, 7, 122, 145; imperial, 32; indenture system and, 16–17; neo­co­lo­ nial, 107; relation to slavery, 14 Ca­rib­be­an: Crossworlds of the World (art exhibition, 2012), 161 Ca­rib­bean Federation, 93, 94 Ca­rib­bean Masala (Ramsaran and Lewis, 2018), 4 Ca­rib­bean region: Afro-­Indian syncretism in, 1, 80–95; “Black Triangle of Africa” and, 36; as center of diasporic consciousness, 121; “Indian world” in, 180n75; Indigenous ­peoples of, 12, 20, 21, 121, 180n81, 195n73; inter-­island rivalry in, 101; naming of, 121, 195n73 Carnival, 42, 159 Car­ter, Marina, 4, 53, 145, 197n36; on kala ­ wners, pani mi­grants as property o 24–25; on relationship between slavery and indenture studies, 18, 19 caste, 11, 18, 37, 89, 114; anti-­caste consciousness, 59; blackness and, 63; castelessness, 3, 156; dark skin as marker of lowe-­caste status, 41; destabilized value of, 38; erasure of caste identity, 23, 25; freedom to reinterpret, 130; sea voyage and, 23–24 Cereus Blooms at Night (Mootoo, 1992), 9, 47–48, 131, 137–140, 142; on cultural creolization of ­women, 146; exile as beloved condition and, 152–155;

index gendered poetics and, 132; religious conversion and trauma in, 147–152 Césaire, Aimé, 4, 31–32, 33 “chakora” (mythical bird), 67, 69, 188n26 Chakravorty, Dipesh, 103 Chamoiseau, Patrick, 31 Chateaubriand, François-­René de, 22 Chatterjee, Partha, 144 Chaturvedi, Benarsidas, 57, 58, 62 China, 91 Chinese Ca­rib­be­a ns, 33, 36, 37, 84, 178n46; Carnival and, 42; repre­sen­ta­tions in Ca­rib­bean fiction, 113–114 Chini-­dad (Hindi: land of sugar), 15 Christians/Christianity, 25, 41, 145, 154; Carnival and, 42; Christianization of Indians in Trinidad, 42–43, 47–48; Eurocentric world order and, 48; patriarchy and, 142; “rice Presbyterians” (rural converts), 13, 147–152 chutney (­music genre), 1, 158–159, 175n1 civil rights movement, American, 34 class solidarity, cross-­racial, 82 Cliff, Michele, 140, 141, 146, 155, 197n28 close reading, 12, 41, 44, 157, 185n171 colonialism, 16, 26, 31, 43; Afro-­Asian solidarity against, 91; afterlives of, 5; hybridity and, 34; residual traces of, 110; Sanadhya’s view of, 63; suffering and legacy of, 106. See also decolonization “Colonisation Scheme” (Luckhoo), 90 Columbus, Christopher, 20, 22, 33, 110 Commonwealth, British, 91, 93 Confiant, Raphaël, 31 contradiction, 2, 43, 87 Contradictory Omens: Cultural Diversity and Integration in the Ca­rib­be­an (Brathwaite, 1970), 84 Coolie, The: His Rights and Wrongs (Jenkins, 1871), 53 Coolie Pink and Green (Mohammed, 2009), 158–159 “coolies,” 2, 3, 16, 51, 122; blackness and, 64; etymology and definition of, 175n2; historical view of “coolie” as polluted, 83; “junglee coolies” (postcolonial rural peasants), 112–113, 114, 129; marginality of, 33; ste­reo­t yped as destitute laborers, 107; stigma of “coolie” identity, 17, 18, 89 Coolie ­Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture (Bahadur, 2013), 55 “coolitude” concept, 3, 177n33, 183n140 Corentyne Thunder (Mittelholzer, 1941), 192n25

223 Creole language, Guyanese, 56, 67, 68, 188n15 Creoles/Creole identity, 4, 17, 116; Black/ African, 4, 12, 16, 30, 42, 89; Creole identity as relational difference, 28–29; ­middle class, 54; White Eu­ro­pean, 27–28, 89 creolization, 11, 46, 114; aesthetics of, 1, 2, 6, 13, 43, 44, 83; African versus Indian, 4–5; Afro-­Indian, 39; anticolonial re­sis­tance and, 83; anti-­creolization, 4; black cultural traditions and, 12; Christian conversion as, 147, 149; contradictions of, 152–153; etymology of, 28, 31; filigree jewelry symbology and, 96–97; gender and, 132, 147, 148; Hosay festival and, 81; imaginary and, 86; importance to literary/cultural production, 43; Indo-­Caribbean literary imaginary and, 2, 12, 26–44, 156; legacy of exclusion and, 27; pro­gress associated with, 106; from rural indenture perspective, 103; as urbanizing phenomenon, 116; Whites and Creole identity, 27 Critical Perspectives on Indo-­Caribbean ­Women’s Lit­er­a­ture (Mahabir and Pirbhai, eds., 2013), 134, 135, 136 Crusoe, Robinson, 30 Cudjoe, Selwyn, 29, 118, 161 cuisine, 1, 25, 31, 201n26 “Cultural Identity in the Diaspora” (Hall), 36–37 Daaga, Maakandal, 38 Dabydeen, David, 8, 15, 54, 108, 158 Damas, Leon, 7 Damra Phag Bahar. See Holi Songs of Demerara Das, Mahadai, 100, 127, 134, 186n186 Dash, Michael, 28 Davies, Carol Boyce, 7 decolonization, 40, 44, 71, 94, 99; as exclusionary pro­cess in India, 74; incompleteness of, 86; Indians marginalized in period of, 72; Indian state policy of nonintervention and, 88; marginalization of Indians and, 46 Deloughery, Elizabeth, 29, 182n125, 194n61 Demerara, 11, 45, 52, 64, 65–66, 166. See also British Guiana; Guyana democracy, po­liti­cal, 65 Desai, Ashwin, 165, 179n70, 201n40 Devanagari script, 55, 56, 67

224 i n d e x diasporas, 5, 7, 13, 44, 65, 165; African and Indian, 9; “arrival” idea and, 157; Ca­rib­bean diaspora as “Black Triangle of Africa,” 36; cosmopolitan, 32; diaspora studies, 9, 10; differences between diasporic experiences, 19; francophone expressions of, 177n33; global Hindutva organ­izations in, 160; Indian writing in En­glish, 168; myth of return and, 54; (post)indenture diasporic consciousness, 46; search for belonging and, 106 Diasporic (Dis)Locations: Indo-­Caribbean ­Women Writers Negotiate the Kala Pani (Mehta, 2004), 135–136 Dispossessed, The (Maharaj, 1992), 8 DOM (départements d’outre mer), 13, 31 Doña Bárbara (Gallegos, 1929), 195n74 Donnell, Alison, 6, 137 Don Segundo Sombra (Güiraldes, 1926), 195n74 dougla, 161, 200n19; dougla poetics, 12, 177n43; as mixed Afro-­Indian cultural identities, 38; as progeny of intercaste marriage, 39 Drayton, Arthur, 79 Du Bois, W.E.B., 33, 91 “East Indian prob­lem,” 72 East Indians in Trinidad: A Study of Cultural Per­sis­tence (Klass, 1961), 4 Emerson, Ralph, 23 Empire Windrush (emigrant ship), 32 Encyclopedia of Twentieth-­Century Latin American and Ca­rib­bean Lit­er­a­ture, 104 En­glish language, 34, 57, 115 Enlightenment, 10 Espinet, Ramabai, 111, 134 Eurocentrism, 17, 48, 147, 150–151 exile, 3, 8, 45, 67; as absolute loss, 131; as beloved condition, 152–155; Ca­rib­bean as temporary place of work, 47; gender-­ inclusive perspective on, 132; heteronormative constructs of, 9, 132; multiple conditions of, 102; permanence of, 69, 106; Ramayana narrative of exile and return, 41, 103; sea voyage and permanent exile, 24; slavery and permanent exile, 16; transnationalism and, 50 failure, aesthetics of, 117 Fanon, Frantz, 33, 86 Fateh Al Razack (first ship carry­ing indentured workers), 164, 200n8

Faulkner, William, 104, 105 feminism/feminist writing, 7, 9, 39, 132, 135–137; Indian identity and, 133; interracial conversations on, 134; lesbianism as discourse of re­sis­tance, 153; literary tropes of, 134 Fijian language, 62 Fiji Islands, 7, 11, 13, 15, 20, 157; fear of Indian domination in, 93; founding of new mi­grant settlements in, 25; Girmit Remembrance Day, 199n7; indenture system in, 19, 45; indigenous populations, 58; Indo-­Caribbean diaspora and, 166; s­ haped by indentured migration, 33 Fiji Mein Mere Ekkis Varsh. See My Twenty-­One Years in the Fiji Islands Flood of Fire (Ghosh, 2015), 10 France/French colonies, 13, 19, 31–32, 164 Fung, Richard, 153 Gallegos, Rómulo, 195n74 Gandhi, Indira, 88 Gandhi, M. K., 63, 90, 92, 188n22, 201n40 Garvey, Marcus, 33, 91 geophagy (earth eating), 111, 128, 129, 195n82 Ghosh, Amitav, 10, 168 Gikandi, Simon, 34, 119 Gillon, Ken, 57 Gilroy, Paul, 35, 36 girmitiyas (“­people who signed agreements”), 25, 51, 64, 181n101; “East Indian prob­lem” and, 72–73; indigenous Fijians compared with, 62; unfulfilled desire to return to India, 59; untouchability of, 63 Glissant, Édouard, 3, 4, 21–22, 73; on anticolonial re­sis­tance, 83, 86; “creoleness” and, 31; on creolization, 85; on “masala” model, 183n140; rhizome image of, 86, 96 global north, 102, 107, 121 global south, 3, 46, 87 Gosine, Andil, 160, 161–164 Gosine, Mahin, 38, 88 Grant, K. J., 198n52 ­Great Depression, 117 Guadeloupe, 20, 32, 33, 162, 185n171 Guiana Boy (Kempadoo, 1960), 192n25 Güiraldes, Ricardo, 195n74 Gujarati language, 57 Guyana, 4, 7, 11, 157; anti-­Indian riots (1970s), 19; creolization in, 25; dougla identity in, 38; effort to create mini-­ India in, 180n75; first indentured

index laborers in, 13; Indian Heritage Day, 199n7; Indians as “outsiders” in, 30; indigenous land rights denied in, 122, 195n76; Indo-­Caribbean writers from, 186n186; Ramleela festival in, 185n171; ­shaped by indentured migration, 33. See also British Guiana; Demerara Hall, Stuart, 4, 20, 21, 157; diasporic cultural identity and, 35, 36–37; on Rastafarians, 30 Haraksingh, Kusha R., 179n59 Haring, Lee, 29 Harris, Wilson, 105 Haunted Line. See Story of the Haunted Line, The: Totaram Sanadhya’s Fiji (Sanadhya, 1922) Heathen Marriage Act (1860), 143–144 He Drown She in the Sea (Mootoo, 2005), 153 Hemingway, Ernest, 104, 105 her rain (Maestro, art exhibit), 106–107, 192n26 heteronormativity, 9, 48, 132, 137 Hindi language, 23, 25, 57, 62, 68 Hindus/Hinduism, 1, 17, 73, 105, 130; altered with Creole influences, 113, 120, 193n42; Aryan culture of north India, 24, 184n166; Carnival and, 42; conversion to Chris­tian­ity, 149, 150, 152; diwali festival, 127; Gan­ges River and, 164; Hindu motifs in Sharma’s Holi Songs, 65, 66–67; Hindu patriarchy, 136; Indo-­Caribbean identity and, 40; Krishna symbolism, 162, 200n25; lower-­caste, 23, 25; in No Pain Like This Body, 124; peasant exploitation and, 105; Ramleela festival, 1, 39, 40; rural folk traditions in Trinidad, 34; syncretism with Islam, 82. See also Phagwa; Ramayana; Ramleela Holi Songs of Demerara [Damra Phag Bahar] (Sharma, 1916), 45, 50, 56–57, 64–70, 186n188; experience of indenture through kavitt (verses), 52; as lost and recovered text, 55; transliterations in, 67–68. See also I Even Regret Night: Holi Songs of Demerara homophobia, 153, 154, 194n54 Hosay (Shi’ia Muslim festival), 1, 42; Hosay massacre (Trinidad, 1884), 74, 79, 185n181; in The Jumbie Bird, 73, 76, 77, 80, 81, 82, 98; national identity and, 82; origin and history of, 81–82

225 Hosein, Gabrielle, 11, 39, 55, 132–133, 134, 165 House for Mr. Biswas, A (Naipaul, 1961), 7, 71, 167, 176n17; assimilation/acculturation in, 114; hybridity and, 35 hybridity/hybridization, 2, 4, 110, 116, 121, 154; creolization and, 31; diasporas and, 5; displacement ­under colonialism and, 34; engendered by indenture, 25; idealization of, 12; limits of, 177n45; Rastarian opposition to, 30 “I am a Coolie” (Singh, 1973), 196n17 identities, Indian, 11, 73; antagonism among, 83; beyond binaries, 72; diversity of, 18; generational differences, 158; monolithic perception of, 157 identity: Indo-­Caribbean, 19, 32, 40, 71, 99, 131, 167; “Indo-­Creole,” 84; pro­cess of formation, 36 identity politics, 36 I Even Regret Night: Holi Songs of Demerara (Sharma), 49, 186n188. See also Damra Phag Bahar imaginary, literary, 2–3, 9, 105, 141; contradiction and, 6; creolization and, 10, 12, 26–44, 156; reduction of, 5; re­sis­tance to ancestral Indian heritage and, 12; ste­reo­t ypes and, 113 Imaginary Homelands (Rushdie), 176n17 ­imagined community, 27, 160 Imaging the Ca­rib­be­an: Culture and Visual Translation (Mohammed), 30 imperialism, American/British/Eu­ro­ pean, 10, 22, 121, 181n90 In a Green Night (Walcott, 1962), 116 indenture literary studies, 9, 43, 47 indenture studies, 3–4, 18, 144, 165, 166 indenture system (1838–1917), 1, 2, 12, 49, 110; anti-­indenture narratives, 45, 53, 143; colonialist narrative of, 53, 159–160; cultural dialecticism of, 67; diasporas spawned by, 45; differences with slavery, 19; geography of, 5; “herstory” of, 141; Hindu/Hindi hegemony in framing of, 23; history of, 13–20; housing of workers, 15; Indo-­Caribbean ­women writers and, 140–147; legacy of double exclusions, 119; “myth of return” and, 19, 69; Nelson Island disembarkation point, 163; as new form of slavery, 18; recruitment for, 58–59, 63; re­sis­tance acts against, 158; termination of (1917), 8, 57, 72, 108

226 i n d e x Indes, Les [“The Indies”] (Glissant, 1965), 21–22 India, 10, 11, 20, 21, 181n96; ancient India in global trade, 23; casteist prejudice in, 64; decentering of symbolic hegemony of, 46; decolonization of, 46, 64, 74; global Hindu culture and, 160; as “Hindustan,” 72, 75, 76, 77, 86, 97, 189n8; in imperial imagination, 21–23; Indo-­Caribbean identities and, 87–95; international festival of Indian lit­er­a­ture (New Dehli, 2002), 167–168; ­Mother India, 79, 89, 90; north–­south divide, 24, 184n166; repatriation of Indo-­Caribbeans as dead/forgotten issue, 77, 89, 92; Sepoy Mutiny (1857), 15, 75, 178n56; South Asian Partition (1947), 46, 77, 87, 189n9; trauma of othering and displacement in, 77–78 India: A Million Mutinies Now (Naipaul, 1990), 167–168 Indian National Congress, 90, 92, 93, 190n32 Indianness, 10, 11, 13, 22, 94; abandonment of, 147; Africanization of, 115; “au­t hen­t ic” constructs of, 149; contradiction and new Indianness, 87; contradictory, 5, 44, 70, 156; cultural hegemony of ancestral mainland and, 2; disconnected from India (“Hindustan”), 72; feminist interrogation of, 39, 136–137; global/historical inclusivity and, 169; Hinduism as predominant public expression of, 23; homogenous idea of, 160; in­de­pen­dence movements and, 95; negotiated meaning of, 3, 5; “new world” constructs of, 20; as Présence Americain, 36; redefined in the Ca­rib­bean, 85; rescripted in the Ca­rib­bean, 6; rural, 17; symbolic importance in conquest of New World, 22; transnational constructs of, 46; writers’ reimagining of, 45 Indian Ocean islands, 3, 13, 25 Indian Time Ah Come in Trinidad and Tobago (Cudjoe), 161 indigeneity, 21, 28, 122, 195n76 Indo-­Caribbean Feminist Thought (Hosein and Outar, eds., 2016), 134, 137 innovation, cultural, 2, 3, 5, 50, 59; creolization and, 6, 12, 114; in Ladoo’s writing, 104, 106, 114, 120, 129–130 International African Ser­v ice Bureau, 91 interraciality, 1, 32, 33, 39

Islam, 21, 41–42, 82. See also Muslims Islam in the Amer­i­cas (Khan), 21 I Want to Be a Poetess of My P ­ eople (Singh, 1977), 134 Jackson, Shona, 122, 195n76 Jagan, Cheddi, 117 jahajians (boat ­people), 132, 137, 200n15; jahaji-­behen (­sisters of the boat), 26, 43, 134; jahaji-­bhais (­brothers of the boat), 26, 43, 44 Jahajin (Mohan, 2005), 134 Jamaica, 37, 189n11 James, C.L.R., 7, 9, 32, 118–119 Jane Eyre (Brontë), 141 janma bhumi (land of birth), 47 Jeevan Prakash [Autobiography of an Indian Indentured Labourer] (Khan, 1994), 187n3 Jenkins, John Edward, 53, 54 Jharkhand (Indian state), 41 Journal of West Indian Lit­er­a­ture, 137 Jouvert (Mahabir, 2018), 134 Jumbie Bird, The (Khan, 1961), 46, 72–80, 131; Afro-­Indian symbology in, 80–95; creolization of Indianness in, 78; decolonization period portrayed in, 74–75, 78, 87, 96–97, 99; India’s relationship to Indo-­Caribbean identities and, 88–95; Indo-­Caribbean creolization and, 95–99; publishing history, 72 Kaladeen, Maria del Pilar, 158 kala pani (black ­waters) passage, 3, 11, 18, 43, 169; ancestral taboos and, 12, 23, 55; ancestral view of overseas travel as social death, 53, 123, 154, 166; birth of narrative of, 49; “blackness” and, 64, 70; gender and, 143, 146; hegemonic narratives of exile and return, 155; heteronormativity and, 9, 132; impossibility of return, 54; legacy of double exclusions, 2, 121; link to global north, 121; as loss and annihilation/failure, 44, 47, 50, 82, 107; loss of caste status and, 25; pre-­indenture usage of kala pani, 24; redetermined as new beginning, 73, 82; as turning point for meaning of Indianness, 26 Kamboureli, Smaro, 105 Kanhai, Roseanne, 38, 134, 153 kar­ma bhumi (land of work), 47, 103 Karnad, Girish, 168, 202n51 Kempadoo, Peter, 192n25 ­Kenya, 13, 20

index Khan, Aisha, 21, 30 Khan, Aliyah, 41 Khan, Ismith, 12, 44, 46, 70, 88, 131, 156; on cultural associations of obeah, 95; Muslim Pathan background of, 78–79; theme of intercultural/interracial dialogue, 90 Khan, Rahman, 187n3 Kingsley, Charles, 30 Klass, Morton, 4 Korom, Frank, 81 Ksha­tri­ya (warrior) caste, 186n187, 187n2 l­ abor, as “universal culture,” 101, 102 Ladoo, Harold Sonny, 8, 12–13, 44, 46–47, 70, 131, 156; chaotic life of, 104; critics and reviewers of, 104–105; death of, 103–104; peasant life humanized by, 101 Lahiri, Jhumpa, 168 Lal, Brij, 4, 18, 51, 57–58, 64; on belonging and arrival/return narratives, 164–165; on cultural expressions of the indentured, 66; on girmitiyas as a prob­lem, 72–73; on “subaltern” nature of gendered re­sis­tance, 135 Lamming, George, 4, 28, 32, 120, 130; on insularity in Ca­rib­bean region, 100–101; on peasants and exiled writers, 117–118; on West Indian identity and writing, 33–34 Last En­glish Plantation, The (Shinebourne, 1988), 134 Laws of Ma­nu, The, 23 Lee, Dennis, 104 Lee-­Loy, Ann-­Marie, 113 Lewis, Linden, 4 lit­er­a­ture, Euro-­A merican, 22, 104, 105 lit­er­a­ture, Indo-­Caribbean, 8, 50, 131; analyzed in binary rubric, 35; evolution of, 1–2; metropolitan focus of, 112; as productive contradiction, 6; racial/ ethnic heterogeneity of, 35; rural peasants in, 103; w ­ omen’s writing neglected, 133 Loichot, Valérie, 183n140 Lokaisingh-­Meighoo, Sean, 19, 120–121 Look Lai, Walton, 16, 26, 178n49, 178n58 Luckhoo, J. A., 90, 190n27 Lutchmee and Dilloo: A Study of West Indian Life (Jenkins, 1877), 53, 54 Maestro, Lani, 106 magical realism, 8 Mahabir, Joy, 4, 134

227 Maharaj, Clem, 8–9 Mailer, Norman, 104 Malaysia, 7 Manilal Doctor, 61 Marathi language, 57 marronage (runaway practices), 5, 6, 43, 111; from ancestral Indian cultural hegemony, 12; petit marronage (small acts of re­sis­tance), 119; symbolic, 167 Marti, José, 121 Martinique, 20, 31, 32; influenced by indentured migration, 33; “masala” model of creolization and, 183n140; Ramleela festival in, 185n171 Mascarene p ­ eople, 31 Mauritius, 7, 11, 20, 60, 157; fear of Indian domination in, 93; as first destination for indentured workers, 13, 19, 53; founding of new mi­grant settlements in, 25; Indian Arrival Day, 199n7; Indian Commissioner of, 94; Indians’ right to vote in, 61; s­ haped by indentured migration, 33 Mehta, Brinda, 11, 12, 135–136, 184n166 mestizaje identity, in Spanish Amer­i­ca, 121–122 Midnight’s ­Children (Rushdie), 167 Miguel Street (Naipaul, 1959), 115, 176n17 Mimic Men (Naipaul, 1967), 176n17 Minty Alley (James, 1936), 9 Mirrorwork: Fifty Years of Indian Writing, 1947–1997 (Rushdie and West, eds.), 6 Mishra, Vijay, 7, 54, 181n101 misogyny, 110, 124 “Miss Blackie” (Naipaul), 7 Mr. Tulsi’s Store (Lal), 165–166 Mittelholzer, Edgar, 192n25 Mohabir, Rajiv, 51, 56, 65, 67, 160 Mohammed, Patricia, 4, 5, 8, 30, 31, 162; on “arrival” discourse, 158, 160; on feminism in the Ca­rib­bean, 148; on Hindu–­Muslim distinction in Trinidad, 189n9 Mohan, Peggy, 134 Mohapatra, Prabhu P., 185n181 Mohar, Rooplall, 192n25 Moko Jumbie (stilt dancing), 42, 80, 185n179 “Mongoose, The” (Walcott), 7 Montaigne, Michel de, 22 Mootoo, Shani, 9, 13, 47, 70, 134, 147, 156; diasporic upbringing of, 153; feminist poetics and, 132; migration to North Amer­i­ca, 44

228 i n d e x Morton, John, 197n36 Morton, Sarah, 197n36 Moses trilogy (Selvon), 193n50 Moutoussamy, Ernest, 177n33 Mozambique (“Portuguese East Africa”), 60 Muharram (Muslim new year), 42, 82, 185n181 music/musicality, 1, 66; calypso, 175n1, 177n43; chutney, 1, 158–159, 175n1; of rural Indian village, 47; soca chutney, 1, 175n1, 177n43; as way of retaining ties to India, 88–89 Muslims, 21, 25, 72; Carnival and, 42; conversion to Chris­tian­ity, 150, 152; Pathans, 74. See also Islam Mystic Masseur, The (Naipaul, 1961), 116, 176n17 Mythologies of Migration (Pirbhai, 2009), 49, 134 My Twenty-­One Years in the Fiji Islands [Fiji Mein Mere Ekkis Varsh] (Sanadhya, 1914), 45, 49, 50, 64; on blackness of castelessness, 52; condemnation of caste and indenture, 59; oral recounting and publishing history, 57, 58; as testimonio, 187n7; on w ­ omen in indenture, 59–60, 188n20 Naipaul, V. S., 8, 71, 105, 111, 169, 176n17; anti-­Muslim tenor of works by, 202n51; Indian diaspora and, 7; Indian travelogues of, 6, 176n18; Lamming’s criticism of, 34; Nobel Prize awarded to, 6, 167, 168; pessimism of, 116, 176n20; ste­reo­t ype of Indian w ­ oman and, 111; urbanization of rural Indians as focus of, 114–115 Nanan, Wendy, 162–163 Naparima Girls’ high school, 148, 198n52 Narain, Denise Decaires, 137 nationalism, Indian, 89, 92, 94; pan-­ Indian nationalism, 90; patriarchal construction of citizenship, 144 Negritude movement, 33, 117, 175n3 “Negro” writers, 34, 35 Nehru, Jawaharlal, 88, 91–92, 190n35 “Nelson Island” (Nanan), 162–163 New Day (Reid, 1949), 116 New Delhi Conference (1947), 91 non-­a ligned movement, 190n35 No Pain Like This Body (Ladoo, 1972), 8, 46–47, 108–112, 184n168; art exhibit inspired by, 106–107; on creolization of

rural community, 101, 131; “junglee coolie” context and, 112–120; New World Indianness concept and, 120–127; Ramayana myth reworked in, 47, 102–103, 107; rice field as site of belonging in, 102–103, 127–130; rural cultural evolution in, 102; ­women’s place and agency in, 110–112 North Amer­i­ca: India’s relations with, 10; Indigenous identity in, 23; migration of Indo-­Caribbean writers to, 13, 44; race riots and Indo-­Caribbeans’ flight to, 19, 106; “second forced exodus” of Indo-­Caribbeans to, 120–121, 194n72 nostalgia, 72, 85, 88, 95, 117, 136 novelas de la tierra (novels of the land), 121 NRIs (nonresident Indians), 6, 54, 135 “Nuestra Amer­i­ca” [“Our Amer­i­ca”] (Marti, 1887), 121 obeah, 80, 95, 189n13 Obeah Man, The (Khan, 1964), 90 O’Callaghan, Evelyn, 137, 153 “Of Cannibals” (Montaigne, 1580), 22 oral traditions, 56 orientalism, 22, 23 Orissa (Indian state), 13 Oroonoko (Behn, 1608), 22 otherness, racial, 26, 30 Our Holy W ­ aters, And Mine per­for­mance (Gosine), 164 Outar, Lisa, 11, 55, 134, 165 Out of the Kumbla (Davies, 1990), 7 Pakistan, 77, 91 pan-­African and pan-­Asian movements, 91, 190n32 Panday, Basdeo, 159 “Passage to India” (Whitman), 22 Pathans, 72, 73, 74, 78, 95, 189n3; as f­ ree mi­grants, 76; Ismith Khan’s f­ amily background and, 78–79 patriarchy, 1, 11, 101, 142; Eu­ro­pean empire and, 141; Hinduism and, 136, 143; in The Jumbie Bird, 74; nuclear f­ amily and, 111 Patterson, Orlando, 119 peasants, 101, 103; creolization and, 107–108; double consciousness in literary legacy and, 112; exiled West Indian writers and, 117–118; failure as facet of peasant consciousness, 106; Hinduism as root of peasant exploitation, 105; as literary trope, 47, 100, 127

index “Per Ajie—­A Tribute to the First Immigrant W ­ omen” (Singh, 1971), 134 Persad-­Bissessar, Kamla, 161, 163, 198n52 Persaud, Lakshmi, 134, 136 Phagwa [Holi] (Hindu festival), 1, 56, 65, 66, 68 Phillips, Caryl, 7 Phillips, Lindsey, 195n82 Pirbhai, Mariam, 4, 11, 53, 134, 137; definition of indenture culture, 100; on gendered quota system, 111; on Indo-­Guyanese lit­er­a­ture, 192n25; on jahaji consciousness, 43–44; on study of indenture narratives, 49 plantation, as literary trope, 47 plantocracy, 17, 32, 65, 94, 119; abuse of ­human rights by, 118; violent history of, 106 Pleasures of Exile, The (Lamming, 1960), 33 Poetics of Relation, The (Glissant), 85 Polynesians, 31 Portugal, indentured workers from, 13, 178n46 postcoloniality, 5, 44, 77, 83 postcolonial studies, 9, 168 Poynting, Jeremy, 133, 152, 179n65 Prashad, Vijay, 23, 181n101 Présence Africaine, 36, 37 Présence Americain, 36, 37 Présence Européenne, 36 Punjab, 13 Puranas (sacred Hindu lit­er­a­ture), 120 Puri, Shalini, 9, 27, 38, 82, 177n43 Rahim, Jennifer, 177n45 Ramacharitmanas, 40, 185n175 Ramanujan, A. K., 125, 195n80 Ramayana (Hindu epic), 40, 41, 185n171; Ladoo’s No Pain Like This Body and, 47, 102–103, 107, 120, 124–126, 127; popularity among indentured workers, 51; return to Ayodhya as ancestral utopia, 41, 47, 102, 124, 125, 127, 129 Ramchand, Kenneth, 32, 35, 116 Ramleela (Hindu festival), 1, 39, 40, 42, 185n171 Ramnarine, Tina, 158 Rampersad, Kris, 42, 89, 90, 193n50 Ramsaran, Dave, 4, 5 Rastafarians, 30, 161 Ravan (“demon” god of Sri Lanka), 41, 125 Reddock, Rhoda, 39, 144 “Reflections on West Indian Writing and Criticism” (Wynter, 1968/69), 117

229 Reid, V. S., 116 repatriation, 16, 20, 178n58, 181n96; agreement between India and Britain on, 73; failure of, 73, 74, 98; in­de­pen­ dence of India (1947) and, 90–91; Indo-­Caribbean belonging and, 46; in The Jumbie Bird, 74, 76, 77, 78, 96; myth of physical return ­a fter passage, 50; number of repatriated indentures, 73, 189n5; (post)indenture belonging and, 48 Ré­union, 13 rhizome concept, 86, 95, 96, 167 Rhys, Jean, 140, 141, 146, 197n28 rice fields, 102, 126; as a birthing site of cultural modernity, 118; dangerous animals in, 108, 109; as literary trope, 120; soil consumption (geophagy) and, 127–130 “rice Presbyterians” (rural Christian converts), 13, 147–152 Rigveda (canonical Hindu text), 23 Rivera, José Eustasio, 195n74 River of Smoke, A (Ghosh, 2011), 10 “Robinsonade” lit­er­a­ture, Islamic origins of, 182–183n125 Romulo, Carlos, 91, 92 Roopchand, Glenn, 161 Roopnarine, Lomarsh, 19, 23, 24, 111 Rushdie, Salman, 6, 7, 167, 176n17 Saladoid p ­ eople, 182n118 Samaroo, Brinsley, 4, 15, 151, 180n75, 190n35 Sanadhya, Totaram, 11, 45, 50, 143, 156; bhak­ti tradition and, 51; caste identity of, 186n187, 187n2; Gandhi’s eulogy on death of, 63; re­spect for indigenous Fijians, 61–62; return to India, 186n (Chap. 1); testimonio of, 52, 187n7 Sanatan Dhar­ma Maha Sabha, 42–43, 160 Schwartz, Barton, 113 Sea of Poppies, The (Ghosh, 2008), 10 Searching for Mr. Chin (Lee-­Loy, 2010), 113 Secrets We Kept: Three ­Women of Trinidad (Sital, 2018), 134 Seecharan, Clem, 4, 17, 19, 90; on Chris­tian­ity in the Ca­rib­bean, 198n55; on the “coolie” colonial term, 112–113 Segal, Daniel, 4 Selvon, Samuel, 27, 34, 71, 72, 105; ste­reo­t ype of Indian w ­ oman and, 111; urbanization of rural Indians as focus of, 114–115

230 i n d e x Senghor, Léopold Sédar, 33 Se­nior, Olive, 145, 198n47 sepoys (soldiers), 78, 178n56 Seth, Vikram, 168 Seychelles, 13 Sharma, LalBihari, 11, 45, 50, 64–65, 156; bhak­ti (devotional) genre and, 51; as orator-­poet, 56; as “sirdar” (plantation overseer), 56 Shinebourne, Jan, 134, 136, 186n186 Singh, Rajkumari, 134, 136, 186n186, 192n25 Singh, Sherry-­Ann, 40–41, 185n175 Sital, Krystal, 134 slavery, 5, 9, 17, 32, 81, 110; abolition of, 14, 178n46; as culture constituted out of ruins, 119; differences with indenture, 19; education system and, 159; emancipation in British colonies (1834), 9; indenture as new form of, 18; slave/ Atlantic studies, 165 Slave Song (Dabydeen, 1984), 108 Small Axe (journal), 161 soca chutney (­music genre), 1, 175n1, 177n43 Social Stratification in Trinidad (Braithwaite, 1953), 4 Sookdeo, Neil, 42 South Africa, 3, 7, 20, 26, 60, 162; Gandhi in, 90, 201n40; influenced by indentured migration, 33; Natal, 13, 19; post-­ indenture cultural evolution in, 11, 157; sugar plantations in, 13, 26 Spanish American Regional Novel, The: Modernity and Autochthony (Alonso, 1990), 121 Sri Lanka, 11, 41, 125 ste­reo­t ypes, 2, 16, 130, 136, 179n65; of Chinese Ca­rib­be­a ns, 113; of “coolies,” 107; of Indo-­Caribbean w ­ omen, 111, 133, 197n36; of rural Indians as “junglee,” 47, 114; “Western gaze” and, 21 Story of the Haunted Line, The: Totaram Sanadhya’s Fiji (Sanadhya, 1922), 45, 50, 57–58, 61–62 subalterns, 52, 53, 187n7 Such, Peter, 103 sugar plantations, 102, 110, 120, 126, 178n58; cultural practices from old world on, 69; end of slavery and, 14; indenture system and, 19; modernity of, 118; in South Africa, 13 Suriname, 7, 11, 25, 60, 157; Indian Arrival Day, 199n7; indigenous ­people’s rights

in, 195n76; Ramleela festival in, 185n171; Saranami Hindustani language in, 187n3 Swinging Bridge (Espinet, 2003), 134 Tagore, Rabindranath, 168 Taino ­people (Arawaks), 180n81, 182n118 Tamil Nadu (Indian state), 13, 184n166 Tamils, 41 Tanganyika, 13 Tata Lit­er­at­ ure Live! Festival (Mumbai, 2012), 168 testimonios, 52, 56, 187n7 Thatcher, Margaret, 36 ­There A ­ in’t No Black in the Union Jack (Gilroy, 1987), 35, 36 “They Came in Ships” (Das), 100 “Third Space” concept (Bhabha), 38, 111 ­Those That Be in Bondage: A Tale of Indian Indenture and Sunlit Western ­Waters (Webber, 1917), 53, 118 “Three Hundred Ramayanas” (Ramanujan), 125 “Three into One C ­ an’t Go—­East Indian, Trinidadian, Westindian” (Selvon), 27 Tinker, Hugh, 17–18, 145 Torabully, Khal, 1, 3, 8, 175n3; “coolie” identification of, 55; “coolitude” concept, 20, 31, 177n33; feminist criticism of, 136; indenture studies and, 4; on interpretations of lit­er­a­ture, 105; on Negritude and the coolie, 33; on sepoys (soldiers), 178n56 Transcendentalists, American, 22–23 trauma, 9, 54, 55, 70, 77–78, 139; gendered, 43, 147; history entwined with personal trauma, 163; intergenerational, 43, 47, 147; legacy of indenture and, 161; loss of ties with India, 166; of Partition, 77; of separation from culture/tradition, 34 Treves, Frederick, 30 Trinidad, 4, 7, 11, 157, 199n60; Afro-­and Indo-­Trinidadian relations, 16–17, 79, 113; Afro-­Caribbean consciousness and, 38; anti-­Indian riots (1970s), 19; Calcutta Settlement, 104, 106; “coolie” stigma in, 87; creolization in, 8, 183n128; decolonization of, 46; dougla identity in, 38; focus on Indo-­Trinidadian writers, 44, 186n186; Hosay massacre (1884), 185n181; indentured workers in, 13; in­de­pen­dence (1962), 72, 76, 95; Indian Arrival Day, 159, 199n7; Indian Commissioner of, 94; Indians as “outsiders” in, 30; indigenous

index land rights denied in, 122; Islam in, 41; Nelson Island disembarkation point, 163; Ramleela festival in, 185n171; Red House (government building), 88; ­shaped by indentured migration, 33; Woodford Square, 76, 81, 88, 97, 189n14 Tulsidas, 40, 41 Turn Again Tiger (Selvon, 1959), 71–72 Uganda, 13 United Kingdom, 36, 133, 162, 164 United Nations, 91 United States, 23, 36, 133 Urdu language, 25, 57 Uttar Pradesh (Indian state), 13, 184n166 Vahed, Goolam, 165, 179n70, 201n40 Vaishya (merchant) caste, 13 Vajpayee, Atal Behari, 167, 168 Valmiki, 40, 51, 125 Vorágine, La [The Vortex] (Rivera, 1924), 195n74 Walcott, Derek, 7, 39–40, 41 WARDROBES per­for­mance series (Gosine), 163–164, 201n34 Webber, A.R.F., 53–54, 118 Wells, Dianne E., 132 We Mark Your Memory: Writings from the Descendants of Indenture (Dabydeen, Kaladeen, and Ramnarine, eds., 2018), 158 West Bengal (Indian state), 41 West Indian identity, 33, 34

231 West Indian Novel and Its Background, The (Ramchand, 1970), 35 West Indies Federation, 38, 46, 72, 117; dissolution of, 189n11; Trinidad and Tobago as capital of, 80 Whitman, Walt, 22, 23 Wide Sargasso Sea (Rhys, 1966), 140, 197n28 Williams, Eric, 117, 151 Windrush writers, 32 ­women, 9, 12, 78; African-­Indian alliances and, 38; alleged corruption by Western civilization, 132, 144; “arrival” discourse and, 160; creolization and, 133, 143, 145–146; female education, 148, 198n52; gendered perspective on indenture and, 132; gendered quota system and, 59–60, 100, 110; jahaji consciousness and, 43–44; rural peasants, 110–112; sea voyage and, 23; taboos around kala pani and, 25 Woodford, Ralph James, 189n14 World War I, 89 World War II, 91, 115 Wyke, Clement H., 104–105 Wynter, Sylvia, 117 Yadav, Yogendra, 51, 57–58 Yesterdays (Ladoo, 1974), 103 “ ‘You Want to Be a Coolie ­Woman?” ’ (Poynting), 179n65 Zanzibar, 20 Zola, Emile, 104

About the Author

atreyee phukan is associate professor of En­glish at the University of San Diego, California, where she teaches courses on literary theory, lit­er­a­ture of the global south, and postcolonial studies.

Available titles in the Critical Ca­rib­bean Studies series Giselle Anatol, The ­Things That Fly in the Night: Female Vampires in Lit­er­a­ture of the Circum-­Caribbean and African Diaspora Alaí Reyes-­Santos, Our Ca­rib­bean Kin: Race and Nation in the Neoliberal Antilles Milagros Ricourt, The Dominican Racial Imaginary: Surveying the Landscape of Race and Nation in Hispaniola Katherine A. Zien, Sovereign Acts: Performing Race, Space, and Belonging in Panama and the Canal Zone Frances R. Botkin, Thieving Three-­Fingered Jack: Transatlantic Tales of a Jamaican Outlaw, 1780–2015 Melissa A. Johnson, Becoming Creole: Nature and Race in Belize Carlos Garrido Castellano, Beyond Repre­sen­ta­tion in Con­temporary Ca­rib­bean Art: Space, Politics, and the Public Sphere Njelle W. Hamilton, Phonographic Memories: Popu­lar M ­ usic and the Contemporary Ca­rib­bean Novel Lia T. Bascomb, In Plenty and in Time of Need: Popu­lar Culture and the Remapping of Barbadian Identity Aliyah Khan, Far from Mecca: Globalizing the Muslim Ca­rib­be­an Rafael Ocasio, Race and Nation in Puerto Rican Folklore: Franz Boas and John Alden Mason in Porto Rico Ana-­Maurine Lara, Streetwalking: LGBTQ Lives and Protest in the Dominican Republic Anke Birkenmaier, ed., Ca­rib­bean Migrations: The Legacies of Colonialism Sherina Feliciano-­Santos, A Contested Ca­rib­bean Indigeneity: Language, Social Practice, and Identity within Puerto Rican Taíno Activism H. Adlai Murdoch, ed., The Strug­gle of Non-­Sovereign Ca­rib­bean Territories: Neoliberalism since the French Antillean Uprisings of 2009 Robert Fatton Jr., The Guise of Exceptionalism: Unmasking the National Narratives of Haiti and the United States Rafael Ocasio, Folk Stories from the Hills of Puerto Rico/Cuentos folklóricos de las montañas de Puerto Rico Yveline Alexis, Haiti Fights Back: The Life and Legacy of Charlemagne Péralte Katerina Gonzalez Seligmann, Writing the Ca­rib­bean in Magazine Time Jocelyn Fenton Stitt, Dreams of Archives Unfolded: Absence and Ca­rib­bean Life Writing Alison Donnell, Creolized Sexualities: Undoing Heteronormativity in the Literary Imagination of the Anglo-­Caribbean Vincent Joos, Urban Dwellings, Haitian Citizenships: Housing, Memory, and Daily Life in Haiti

Krystal Nandini Ghisyawan, Erotic Cartographies: Decolonization and the Queer Ca­rib­bean Imagination Yvon van der Pijl and Francio Guadeloupe, eds., Equaliberty in the Dutch Ca­rib­be­an: Ways of Being Non/Sovereign Patricia Joan Saunders, Buyers Beware: Insurgency and Consumption in Ca­rib­bean Popu­lar Culture Atreyee Phukan, Contradictory Indianness: Indenture, Creolization, and Literary Imaginary