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Abstract
This paper focuses on chutney, a form of popular music in Trinidad with roots in prepartitioned North India, as an intriguing genre through which, culturally, to analyze Trinidadian social dynamics. It concentrates on developments during the Trinidad Carnival of 2009 to illustrate how chutney interrogates and confronts a variety of interrelated struggles over multiple identities—musical, socio-cultural and racial—in a bid to reinscribe broader definitions of Trinidadianness and challenge traditional notions of Indianness. Through lyrical, timbral, thematic, and performative analyses, the paper explores three popular chutney recordings of 2009—“Rum & Roti,” “Radica,” and “Jep Sting Naina”—to uncover the discursive and often discrepant complexities of Trinidadian culture.
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Darrell Gerohn Baksh
Darrell Gerohn Baksh is a PhD candidate in the Cultural Studies program at The University of the West Indies, St Augustine Campus, Trinidad. Born in Canada to Caribbean immigrants, he is a graduate of the University of Toronto, where he majored in Caribbean Studies and double-minored in South Asian Studies and Music History and Culture. At present he is completing his doctoral dissertation on research which engages the development of chutney soca music in Trinidad as a form of remixed culture and its relationship to discourses of Trinidadian identity and nationalism.