Bajan-Indians: emergent identities of the Gujarati-Muslims of Barbados

ABSTRACT

This paper presents primary research on a specific Indian ethno-religious group present in Barbados: the Gujarati-Muslims. Indian migration to Barbados began at the turn of the twentieth century. During its near one hundred year presence on the island, the group has inserted itself into the Barbadian society as a well-defined religious group and a significant merchant class. This article examines the ways in which Gujarati-Muslims negotiate their identities within a predominantly black Christian society. The study relies on creolisation theory to inform its understandings, and argues that Gujarati-Muslims perceive themselves as having hybrid identities, thereby disrupting the monistic paradigms of nation, culture and belonging. Creolisation theory also facilitates an analysis of the intricate dimensions of the arbitration and social construction of the Bajan-Indian group identity.

KEYWORDS:

• Gujarati-Muslims
• merchant class
• creolisation
• ethno-religious group
• hybrid racial relations
• Barbados

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Dr Haajima (Hajra) Degia is a Barbadian sociologist with research interests in race and ethnic relations, gender, and the migration of South Asian populations to the Caribbean. She is interested in the dynamics of immigrant-mainstream cooperation and conflict. She has lectured at the University of the West Indies Cave Hill and currently teaches Sociology at the Barbados Community College. She has written on gender, schooling and Muslim girls’ identity formation, and continues to engage in research linked to ethnicity and the intersection of social class, race and gender and how these categories work in the construction of boundaries.

Notes

1 Bajan is the colloquial term for a native of Barbados.

2 Gujaratis are relatively wealthy, but they do not necessarily command a high status in the Barbadian social structure. One can reference Max Weber's ideas of class to examine their social locations. J. G. La Guerre (1993, 16) has said about Weber’s (1958) views on class that he saw it as ‘a status grouping based on perceptions and lifestyle’. Within the social space of Barbados, ‘othering’ processes lead Gujarati-Muslims to be perceived as not having the lifestyle of the middle class. In the Weberian sense therefore, their ‘market situation’ cannot be conflated with their ‘class status’.

3 Although this is still a debatable point. In Trinidad for example, Presbyterian missionaries were actively involved in converting and interacting with indentured workers from as early as 1868.

4 Partition did not filter into the historical narratives of why 1947 was an important year. The villages where they came from were for the most part unaffected by Partition. Nobody speaks of the Partition as being a cause of the people coming to Barbados. In the historical narratives of the respondents, however, drought and famine play a central role in why left their village homes.

5 An orhni is a rectangular shaped scarf. It is described by Lisa Winer (2008, 653) in the Dictionary of the English/Creole of Trinidad & Tobago as ‘a traditional Indian woman's scarf worn around the neck, sometimes covering the head, with the ends hanging down in back, or one end in front over the bosom and one in back’. In the early twentieth century context, both among indentured and passenger Indians, the orhni was usually made from an organza/chiffon/muslin material. According to Janet Naidu (2005), the ohrni was: ‘not a traditional Indian garment, but a modified version of the sari’, and was used to cover a woman's head, mostly at religious and cultural functions.