Exploring an "old verbal ambiguity": East Indian ethnicity and identity in Trinidad and the British Caribbean.

Chowdhury, Amitava

The East Indian diaspora in the Caribbean--the diaspora that has been variously termed as the "diaspora of the old" or the "subaltern diaspora," distinguishing it from the late 20th-century Indian migrations to the industrialized parts of the world--is one that has woven its identity in contrast and in exclusion of African-derived identities. For a very long time, both the diasporic and academic examinations of the diaspora have assumed and insisted on an immutable cultural continuity--an abiding link to the homeland--as the very basis of identarian claims. And yet a plethora of examples drawn from a number of smaller islands in the Caribbean, where only a handful of East Indian indentured immigrants arrived in the 19th century, or those destinations elsewhere in the world that Indian slaves, craftsmen, and artisans reached in the 18th century, reveal that lineage is not sufficient, or even crucial, in future invocations of identarian articulations. What is ignored in the debate between cultural persistence and theories of acculturation in explaining diasporic identity formation, insofar as the East Indian diaspora in the Caribbean is concerned, is the effect that the colonial cauldron and imperial governmentality played in creating, guiding, shaping, and limiting expressions of identity. This brief essay explores the colonial and imperial dimensions of East Indian subaltern diasporic identity formations in the Caribbean. It does so by engaging with three of the most perceptive works on East Indians in Trinidad: Munasinghe (2001), Khan (2004), and Niranjana (2006). It is not my intention to provide encompassing reviews of the works discussed here. Rather, I would like to examine the question of colonial and imperial forces at work in East Indian identity formation as reflected, considered, and captured in these three works. While none of these works are explicitly historical in their orientations, I argue that an historical appraisal of the formational aspects of diasporic identity is crucial to unraveling the contemporary diasporic dialogues and dissonance.

Foisting Identity: Prefiguring Ethnicity and Colonial Race Hierarchy

Similar to several other post-emancipation societies, Trinidad experimented with a variety of wage labour in the years leading up to East Indian immigration, which commenced in 1845. While the reasons behind East Indian immigration cannot be solely determined from within the Trinidadian context, as the determinants of South Asian labour migrations in the 19th century were nuanced and complicated, it remains the case that the entire indenture project was a masterful imperial strategy of labour reallocation, particularly devised to bring down wages. (2) Although primarily determined by economic considerations, the context in which the labourers from India were "injected" into the Caribbean plantation system had attendant cultural ramifications and justifications. Viranjini Munasinghe shows that labour immigration was garbed under a humanitarian and moral discourse, whereby it was argued that the industrious labourers from India would eventually uplift the "moral character" of the local African-derived workers (Munasinghe 2001, 57). However, such a claim could only be placed when juxtaposed with a separate claim of degeneracy of the existing emancipated labourers. Thus, the entire indentured project was entwined with a claim of African degeneracy, sometimes implicit and often explicit. Munasinghe argues that such dichotomization "prefigured future descriptions and debates concerning the 'shrewd' yet 'vulnerable' East Indian and the 'Western-oriented' yet 'childlike' Creole" (Munasinghe, 59).

Even before its inception, therefore, built in the very conceptualization of indentured immigration was a constructed antagonism between the African-derived and Indian populations. Munasinghe points out: "[W]hen East Indians entered Trinidad, a discourse deriding the moral, mental, and physical attributes of the Negro was already in place for Indians to learn, and later to use, for their own ends" (2001, 64). The new Indian labour force had effectively dismantled the existing labour force's bargaining power. The atmosphere was ripe with mutual distrust, condemnation, and antagonism, but it was further exacerbated by the financing provisions laid down by the colonial government. In Trinidad, almost two-thirds of the cost of East Indian immigration was paid from export duties on products and commodities produced by existing labour populations, and the remaining portion was covered by public revenue.

The ideological origins of dichotomization of Indians and Africans had deeper roots than what appeared in the plantation universe. Aisha Khan (2004) unravels the particular ways in which imperial classificatory schemes mapped on to the colonized worlds. Ideas about the Indians drawn from a 19th-century obsession with classification ultimately set the tone for race relations in the colonies. Khan makes an interesting point about the emerging nature of a characterization of India and Indians that cast them in dualistic terms in the 19th century. In this view, the Indians either embodied a "high culture" with glorious ancient traditions, or they were painted as barbaric and cruel, mired in superstitions and retrogressive practices. Beyond this imagined universe of an inherent Indian duality was recognition of plurality and diversity within the subcontinent. It is true that Europeans saw India as an inherently heterogeneous arena replete with contrasts, but such notions of diversity did not carry forward to the indentured destinations, and they easily dissipated in the plantation context. As a result, the multiplicity of Indian identities was readily conflated (Khan, 41). The boundaries between the different ethnic groups were clearly demarcated, and a singular concept of an "East Indian" was born, thereby denying the possibilities of dialogues across ethnic boundaries. In the plantations, the real difference between the perceived ethnic categories--East Indian, African, Chinese, and European--now construed in cultural terms, was in reality "the product of the mediation of culture by the social allocation of labour" (Khan, 34).

While Munasinghe recognizes the colonial plantation economic considerations to be the root of "foretelling ethnicity" before the commencement of indentured immigration, and Khan depicts a wider global imperial classificatory ideology to be the origin of identarian distinctions, Tejaswini Niranjana (2006) brings up a third distinct direction that warrants some attention. Drawing from Walter Rodney (1981) and Malcolm Cross (1978), Niranjana identifies colonial apprehensions of workforce solidarity to be the chief causative in prefiguring ethnicity. In this view, the success of the Haitian Revolution and the foundation of the new Haitian Republic created a deep sense of fear not only among the planters in the Caribbean, but also in the highest echelons of imperial administrations. Niranjana argues that a "hint of solidarity between labourers, especially of different races, was sought to be speedily crushed" (Niranjana, 31). In the final days of slavery in the British Empire, seeds of future dissensions between the "Indian" and the "African" were sown in the shape of mutually derogatory stereotypes. Myths of the lazy African and the hardworking "coolie" circulated freely; on one hand, they were deployed to safeguard against worker solidarity and, on the other, created conditions that would justify importing foreign labourers in large numbers. In the 19th century, thus were created two abiding categories--the East Indian and the creole--culturally mediated and diametrically opposed to each other.

These three approaches, overlapping to some extent, help us in understanding the arc of the imperial mind at work in creating categories that not only served the immediate colonial, plantation, and economic purposes, but they also "inform the contemporary formations of the two groups' identities" (Niranjana, 31). While much of the earlier anthropological, sociological, and historical analyses of East Indian identity in the Caribbean and across the "subaltern diaspora" rested on theories of continuity, retention, and persistence of an immutable cultural trait, and while some have modified such views in the last three decades, utilizing perspectives of acculturation and assimilation, the historical origins outlined above provide a perspective on formational identity that has remained largely ignored in the literature.

Consolidating Categories: East Indians in Trinidadian Plantations and Enduring Group Identities

The colonial and imperial dimensions of foisting identity categories on a heterogeneous and plural group did not only operate prior to the commencement of indentured immigration, they also worked throughout the period of indenture in Trinidad. Colonial actions ensured the consolidation of ethnic categories and group identities by preventing East Indians from freely mixing with Africans. Of course, the two groups were inimically disposed owing to various other reasons, sometimes created and sometimes exacerbated by colonial action and premeditation, but official measures taken to segregate the two groups stifled other possibilities. The East Indian labourers had a markedly dissimilar legal status compared to the wider society. The indenture contract provided for a return passage to India after completion of the contractual period. While a majority of the Indians re-indentured or stayed on permanently in the plantation society, a notion and a sense of what Naipaul has called "familiar temporariness" lingered on. As Munasinghe notes, their legal status as temporary contractual workers prevented them from fully aligning themselves with the larger society (Munasinghe 2001, 73).

More importantly, the majority of the immigrant labourers were located in the "sugar belt" of Trinidad in the western part of the island isolated from the wider host society. Residentially segregated in a secluded horizon, the East Indian group identity consolidated over time. The heterogeneous and plural elements of the Indian community reoriented themselves within a homogeneous singular East Indian identity. The process of isolation and homogenization was further accentuated by a different legal measure. Every attempt was made between the inception of an indentured labour system in 1845 and the mid-1850s to curtail the mobility of the labourers and to firmly tie them to the plantations. The ordinances of 1854, for example, provided incentive to the planters for rehiring time-expired indentured labourers and penalized the labourers themselves for vagrancy (Munasinghe 2001, 74). Such measures ensured a steady supply of labourers to the planters and made cross-community interrelations difficult. Furthermore, the labourers under contract and even the time-expired labourers were required to obtain and carry a pass at all times. Strict implementation of the pass system further contributed to immobility and segregation of the East Indians. Held captive both "spatially and socially" in the sugar plantations, what was implied, imagined, and insisted upon earlier, in terms of Indian group identity prior to the arrival of the East Indians, now gradually became a reality. It is now that internal identarian consciousness of the indentured immigrants aligned with the external identarian impositions of the colonial state.

Munasinghe points to another legal provision that further alienated the East Indians and Africans and consolidated the former's group identity. In the second half of the 19th century, time-expired immigrants were offered land grants if they agreed to forgo their right of return passage (Munasinghe 2001, 76). As a direct consequence, a vast majority of the East Indians remained tied to the land and continued to remain segregated from the larger society that increasingly took to a wider range of professions. The African-derived population got into cocoa production; since the demands and duration of cocoa production were less than that of sugar, it was possible to combine it with food crops. Very soon cocoa generated greater revenue and the wider African society became upwardly mobile much earlier than the East Indians. By the end of the 19th century, the Afro-Trinidadians were evenly distributed in a multitude of professions including a significant number in professional and official positions. The Indians, even at this late stage, remained mired in agricultural production as a direct consequence of the legal provisions constructed by the colonial state (Munasinghe, 77).

Similarly, Khan also points to legal and spatial segregation of the East Indians, where the latter was exclusively painted as well-suited to agricultural practices. Khan argues that the "mutually exclusive geography" created a "racial landscape" where the occupationally diverse Africans flocked to the urbanized north, and the occupationally homogeneous East Indians remained confined in the rural south (Khan 2004, 68). Crucial in this polarization were allusions to an earlier colonial construct that described the Indians as ideally suited to agriculture and the Africans as lazy and averse to field toil. Indians' particular attraction of land and agricultural ways was not only extolled in colonial days, but such notions have also persisted in contemporary times. Khan portrays how retrospective accounts ranging from academic scholarship to fictional accounts ascribe a natural and inherited agrarian affinity of the Indian to their predominance in the agricultural sector. Khan (after Ralph Sammy) considers an alternative possibility in a particularly perceptive reflection. Originally placed there by the colonial state and later finding themselves in the midst of an "omnipresent plantation system," the East Indian "developed values, codes of behavior, and beliefs that established them as a group, with common ideals and goals" (Khan, 70). Further, the "conflation of agricultural and rural, Indians, indenture, and authentic tradition became condensed into the local gloss, South" (Khan, 71; emphasis in the original). The polarization of the Indian rural South and the African cosmopolitan North cannot be understood in any other context besides colonial arbitration of occupational and spatial segregation. Just as a global imperial ideology, apprehension, and economic prudence originally constructed an enduring duality prior to the onset of indentured immigration, colonial actions over the 19th century similarly ossified the categories of formational identity and made them appear as if they had always existed. Realities and metaphors of mixture were elided in favour of an original and enduring purity. East Indian identity in the mind of the diasporic and even in scholarly iterations, for the greater part of the 20th century, appeared to have emanated from an abiding persistence of immutable cultural traits as a final endorsement of the "trope of derivativeness" (Niran-jana 2006, 36).

The Diaspora and the Nation: Post-indenture Politics and the Discourse of Purity

The articulated differences between the "coolie" and the "creole," the East Indian and the African, created through the machinations of colonial discourses throughout the 19th century, resulted in reified categories so different that it was inconceivable for them to mix. A discourse of hierarchy deployed by a global imperial ideology translated into a discourse of purity in the plantation context. Thus to be Indians in the colonial plantation context was to be "pure" unadulterated Indians, reservoirs of an unchanging cultural memory. A similar discourse of purity was espoused by emergent Indian nationalism in the late 19th century, and especially by the Indian nationalist movements of the 20th century. A singularity of East Indian identity created by the many manipulations of the imperial order created reified categories that were now being reinforced by the colonial subjects. Purity denied mixture, the realities of the plantation world notwithstanding.

The very process that brought together various East Indian heterogeneities into a singular articulated purity was also the process that made it impossible for the Indians to participate in the Trinidadian nationalist project. Munasinghe points out that to be West Indian in the 20th century came to imply an irrevocable mixture--"a real mix up." Thus the East Indian group, through a mutually reinforced discourse of purity, found themselves outside the local nationalist discourse. This does not mean, however, that the Indians did not mix with other groups in Trinidad (or elsewhere in plantation societies, for that matter). Munasinghe, in an acutely poignant statement, brings out the nature of the conundrum: "it was not the fact that this putatively pure East Indian race did not mix with other pure or mixed races but rather that this mixing was erased rather than memorialized" (Munasinghe 2001, 83). Thus, East Indians were excluded from all genealogical associations that would reveal or imply their connections with other ethnic groups, and as a result the "East Indians as an ethnic group were configured against the nation" (88) of Trinidad, while simultaneously drawn closer to the emerging nationalism and nation in India. In a similar vein, Khan points out that to be Trinidadian was to vivify the metaphor of mixture as an organizational principle of racial, religious, cultural, and by extension national identities. In this metaphorical horizon, the East Indian inhabits a space that elides the actuality of mixture and reinforces the logic of derivativeness, lineage, continuity, retention, persistence, and purity. If callaloo, a West Indian culinary mishmash, is the supreme metaphor of West Indian mixture, then, as Khan writes, the "Indo-Trinidadians live callaloo and idealize purity" (Khan 2004, 222).

The trope of purity, originally an imperial mythmaking project and increasingly accessed by the East Indians in the 20th century, curiously came to light during the Indian nationalist movement against indenture. As Niranjana sketches out, the Indian nationalist project in the late 19th century made the women's issue a central one. Women's monogamy, Niranjana argues, became a pivotal sine qua non of an emerging Indian/Hindu nation (2006, 77). Explicit in the early nationalist project were various articulations of feminine purity, motherhood, and domesticity that would conceivably bring India out of the throes of colonialism into the light of modernity. Incompatible with this vision of nationalist modernity was the image of the indentured woman coerced into colonial bondage and debased by adverse sex ratios. Contrary to the emerging persona of the pure Indian/Hindu nationalist modern, the indentured women in the colonies stood against the very virtues that would define the emerging nation. Thus when abolition of indenture became a central project of the early nationalist movement in India, what was most frequently invoked was the degenerated and fallen image of the indentured woman. Niranjana points out that at the final phase of this abolitionist mission, the Indian nationalists were able to convince Viceroy Hardinge that "indenture-ship ... condemns Indian women to prostitution" (Niranjana, 81). We now know that only a tiny fraction of the indentured women were engaged in prostitution in India prior to emigration. Nevertheless, the very notion of itinerant women working outside the confines of the domestic sphere in an alien land was enough for the early nationalists to describe the migrant women as prostitutes. What is striking about this particular invocation of the trope of purity in conjunction with the nascent stage of Indian nationalism is a conspicuous juxtaposition of the imperial language of hierarchy (bolstered by the rhetoric of purity) with the nationalist modern articulation of feminine virtue (as a metaphor of purity).

The image of an ideal India painted in the nascent days of nationalism was an image that traveled halfway around the globe to the Caribbean plantations. Here again, instead of any reality of lineage, or persistence and retention of cultural institutions, what reinforced a separate, separated, and consolidated Indian identity was the network of an emerging nation-state born of the very fabric of colonialism that it set out to terminate. In the wake of Trinidadian nationalist politics in the 1930s, the handful of East Indian elite who did participate in a vision of Trinidadian nationhood gradually drifted away when pulled by the discourses of purity espoused by the Indian nationalist modern. I have elsewhere, in a discussion on a separate geographical locale, called this process "reciprocity"--a reciprocal relationship between the formational diaspora and the home (Chowdhury, forthcoming). It is interesting to note similar processes of reciprocity in action in 1930s Trinidad. Munasinghe points out that at this crucial juncture, when the majority of East Indians did not identify with Trinidadian nationalism and only a few East Indian elites did, Indian nationalist emissaries started arriving from India. Munasinghe notes that this renewed link "with India witnessed a resurgence of ethnic pride among Indo-Trinidadians, and the glorification of ancient Indian civilization in numerous public lectures gave the traditional elite the moral authority to challenge the modernizing elite" (2001, 190-191). The growing discourse of ancestral exceptionalism steered even some of the most committed East Indian Trinidadian nationalists into a newfound "Indian nationalist cause." A quest of purity, informed by Indian nationalism, further segregated the Indian community from the rest of the population, and the wider society accused the East Indians of being antithetical to the Trinidadian nationalist cause (Munasinghe, 194). Khan too refers to this paradoxical process of East Indian reciprocity in the formative stage of Trinidadian nationalism. An issue of the East Indian Weekly carried an article that argued for the establishment of "a nexus with our dear Mother India that is so necessary to keep alive the spark of nationalism and racial affection that burns in the breast of every son of India" (Khan 2004, 143, quoted in Samaroo 1977). Such processes of reciprocity, on the one hand, infused the East Indian spirit with pride in their origins; on the other hand, the same pride was deployed in staking a claim in the Trinidadian narrative. But ultimately, pride born in the rhetoric of racial purity did only exacerbate the divide between the East Indians and the larger society.

Munasinghe writes that the Indian independence movement (and the eventual independence in 1947) stoked the fire of Indian consciousness amongst the East Indians in Trinidad. East Indian public meetings employed Indian nationalist songs, and a case for "resuscitation" of Indian culture through enhanced exchanges with India was made in the public platforms (Munasinghe 2001, 200). Indian films arrived in Trinidad, and along with them came further cultural emissaries and a "host of Indian missionaries." Similarly, Khan too finds a connection between Indian independence and an aggravated relationship between the East Indians and the rest of the society in Trinidad. In 1948, when an Indian commissioner arrived in India, Trinidadian statesman Albert Gomes noted that behind the apparent cultural envoy represented by the commissioner was hidden a "sinister purpose ...

Indian separatism was being sedulously fostered" (quoted in Khan 2004, 72-73). Just as the colonial state found it necessary to segregate the East Indian immigrant labourers and the wider society, the postcolonial nation-state inadvertently contributed to the same outcome. The process of reification of categories born in the early 19th century global imperial ideology reached its final culmination in the wake of dissolution of the imperial frame. Both in the political and academic arena, it became impossible now to dissociate East Indian identity from perceived notions of cultural retention, persistence of mores, and the discourses of derivativeness. In a curious turn of events, the colonial design was finally completed by the very act of dismantling the colonial apparatus.

Concluding Thoughts

In this brief essay I have pointed out, by resting on the scaffolding provided by three works on East Indians in Trinidad, that a central arbiter in formational identity born in colonial days was the colonial state itself. History and Cultural Studies amongst other cognate disciplines now firmly hold that identity is impermanent, contingent, and contextual. And yet, both academic articulations and political projects on East Indian identity rarely engage with the formative phase and imperial/colonial dimension of identarian categories. It is rarely questioned why the East Indian is "Indian" at all. Is it because of an original, unchanging, immutable, and derived "Indianness," or is it because of an overriding manipulative self-congratulatory imperial ideology articulated through machinations of the colonial state that, on the one hand, dismantled local, plural, heterogeneous diversities and, on the other hand, allocated predefined units into neatly defined pigeonholes born in the laboratory of the imperial mind?

Works Cited

Chowdhury, Amitava. Forthcoming. Horizons of memory: Indian indentured labor and identity in the Caribbean and the Indian Ocean.

Cross, Malcolm. 1978. Colonialism and ethnicity: A theory and comparative case study. Ethnic and Racial Studies 1.1: 37-59.

Kale, Madhavi. 1998. Fragments of Empire: Capital, Slavery, and Indian Indentured Labor in the British Caribbean. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Khan, Aisha. 2004. Callaloo Nation: Metaphors of race and religious identity among South Asians in Trinidad. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Munasinghe, Viranjini. 2001. Callaloo or Tossed Salad? East Indians and the cultural politics of identity in Trinidad. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Naipaul, V. S. 1972. The Overcrowded Barracoon and Other Articles. Worcester and London: Trinity Press.

Niranjana, Tejaswini. 2006. Mobilizing India: Women, music, and migration between India and Trinidad. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Rodney, Walter. 1981. A history of the Guyanese working people, 1881-1905. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Samaroo, Brinsely. 1977. "The Vanguard of Indian Nationalism in Trinidad": The East Indian Weekly, 1928-1932. In Conference Papers, Ninth Annual Conference of Caribbean Historians, 3-7 April, Cave Hill, Barbados.

AMITAVA CHOWDHURY

Queen's University

Notes

(1) The expression "old verbal ambiguity" is from Naipaul (1972, 33).

(2) See, for example, Kale (1998). Walter Rodney and K. O. Laurence have also made the same point earlier.