Tropical longing: the quest for India in the early twentieth-century Caribbean

Abstract

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Indian indentured labourers in the Caribbean and their descendants were viewed by the British and by those within the subcontinent in often contradictory ways – both as docile, more culturally respected alternatives to black workers and as examples of brokenness and degradation from a subcontinental norm. I examine here various Indian and non-Indian views about the status of Caribbean Indianness and about the virtues and disadvantages of these migrants maintaining ties with the subcontinent. An analysis of essays, poetry, cultural societies and short stories from the period and a consideration of both class and spatial assumptions about what constituted Indianness expose the innovative ways in which these diasporic Indians actively shaped and negotiated relationships to British culture, to India and to notions of modernity.

Keywords:

• Caribbean
• indentureship
• Indianness
• diaspora
• racialization
• class
• language
• creolization

Notes

1. Rampersad, Finding a Place, 10.

2. Smith, Creole Recitations, 18–19.

3. Pearson, ‘Life History of an East Indian’, 17.

4. Ibid., 21.

5. See, for instance, the representation of Indian characters in the novels Of Age and Innocence by George Lamming and A Morning at the Office by Edgar Mittelholzer.

6. Smith, Creole Recitations, 20.

7. Pearson, ‘Life History of an East Indian’, 18.

8. Ibid., 18.

9. Ibid., 20.

10. Ibid., 21.

11. Ibid., 21–2.

12. I use ‘Guianese’ and ‘British Guiana’ when referring to the country and its people during its pre-independence period. Upon achieving independence from Britain in 1966, the spelling of the Amerindian name meaning ‘Land of Many Waters’ was changed to ‘Guyana’. For references to the postcolonial period, I employ ‘Guyanese’ and ‘Guyana’.

13. Seecharan, Joseph Ruhomon's India, 2.

14. Ruhomon, ‘India’, 44–5.

15. Ibid., 45.

16. Ibid., 46.

17. Ibid., 46.

18. Ibid., 47.

19. Ibid., 48.

20. Ibid., 50.

21. Bernabé, Chamoiseau, Confiant, Éloge de la Créolité, 75.

22. P. Ruhomon, ‘Building of Greater India’, 64–5.

23. Niranjana, Mobilizing India, 78.

24. See Tinker, New System of Slavery.

25. P. Ruhomon, ‘Building of Greater India’, 65.

26. Ibid., 65.

27. Ibid., 67.

28. Persaud, ‘To India’, 179.

29. Ibid., 180.

30. Poynting, ‘At Homes, Tagore and Jive’, 93.

31. Ibid., 94–5.

32. Ibid., 96.

33. See Singh's 1973 essay, ‘I am a Coolie’, 25–7.

34. Shih, ‘Comparative Racialization’, 1354.

35. V.S. Naipaul, ‘Foreword’, 18.

36. S. Naipaul, Adventures of Gurudeva, 188.

37. Glissant, Caribbean Discourse, 46–7.

38. S. Naipaul, Adventures of Gurudeva, 115.

39. Quoted in Smith, Creole Recitations, 185.

40. Rampersad, Finding a Place, 24.

41. S. Naipaul, Adventures of Gurudeva, 135.

42. Smith, Creole Recitations, 124.

43. Ibid., 21; Ismith Khan's 1974 novel, Jumbie Bird, for the proud memories of rebellion that the Pathan protagonist, Kale Khan, retains and his continued battles in Trinidad.

44. S. Naipaul, Adventures of Gurudeva, 136.

45. Ibid., 180.

46. See Sasenarine Persaud, ‘I Hear a Voice, Is It Mine?’.

47. S. Naipaul, Adventures of Gurudeva, 131.

48. See Casteel, Second Arrivals.

49. Selvon, ‘Three into One Can't Go’, 213.

50. V.S. Naipaul, ‘Foreword’, 16.

51. Ibid., 14.

52. V.S. Naipaul, Between Father and Son, 71.

53. Ibid., 144.

54. Smith, Creole Recitations, 118.

55. Manuel, East Indian Music in the West Indies, 201.

56. Ibid., 203; Niranjana, Mobilizing India, 174.

57. S. Naipaul, Adventures of Gurudeva, 92.

58. Niranjana, Mobilizing India, 22.