Mobilizing India
By Tejaswini Niranjana

Subtitle ‘Women, Music, and Migration between India and Trinidad’

Popular music/ South Asian studies/ Caribbean studies

Descendants of indentured labourers brought from India to the Caribbean between 1845 and 19I7 comprise more than forty percent of Trinidad's population today. While many Indo­-Trinidadians identify themselves as Indian, what "Indian" signifies-about nationalism, gender, culture, caste, race, and religion-in the Caribbean is different from what it means on the subcontinent. Yet the ways that "Indianness" is conceived of and performed in India and in Trinidad have historically been, and remain, intimately related. Offering an innova­tive analysis of how ideas of Indian identity negotiated within the Indian Diaspora in Trini­dad affect cultural identities "back home," Tejaswini Niranjana models a necessary project: comparative research across the global South, scholarship that decenters the "first world" West as the referent against which postcolonial subjects understand themselves and are un­derstood by others.

Niranjana draws on nineteenth-century travel narratives, anthropological and historical studies of Trinidad, Hindi film music, and the lyrics, performance, and reception of chut­ney-soca and calypso songs to argue that perceptions of Indian female sexuality in Trinidad have long been central to the formation and disruption of dominant narratives of nation­hood, modernity, and normative sexuality in India. She illuminates debates in India about "the woman question" as they played out in the early-twentieth-century campaign against indentured servitude in the tropics. In so doing, she reveals India's disavowal of the inden­tured woman-viewed as morally depraved by her forced labour in Trinidad-as central to its own anti-colonial struggle. Turning to the present, Niranjana looks to Trinidad's most dynamic site of cultural negotiation: popular music. She describes how contested ideas of Indian femininity are staged by contemporary Trinidadian musicians-male and female, of both Indian and African descent-in genres ranging from new hybrids like chutney-soca to the older but still vibrant music of Afro-Caribbean calypso.

"Tejaswini Niranjana listens to the tones and echoes of Indianness in the Caribbean and elaborates a South-South genealogy that obligates us to reconceive the cultural geography of modernity. From the 'moral status of the coolie woman' in British colonialist and Indian nationalist discourses to the figure of the 'Indian woman' in Afro-Trinidadian calypso, Hin­di cinema musics, and female chutney-soca performances, she pronounces the gendered rhythms of popular music as subaltern cultural politics. "
-LISA LOWE, author of Immigrant Acts: On Asian American CulturaI Politics

"Tejaswini Niranjana's fine achievement in MobiIizing India is lo have given shape to a compelling way of rethinking the conceptual agenda for the comparative study of the Third World."
-DA VI D SCOTT, author of Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment

Tejaswini Niranjana is a Senior Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society in Bangalore, India.

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS
ISBN 0-8223-3842-4

Box 90660 * Durham, NC 27708-0660 * www.dukeupress.edu

 

 

 

On the cover: Oenise Belfon performs "I Am Looking for an Indian Man." Prom a DVD of the 2004 International Soca Monarch competition, © COTT, Carotte Music Publishing 2003