Tales, Tunes, and Tassa Drums: Retention and Invention in Indo-Caribbean Music.

Lara, Francisco D.

Tales, Tunes, and Tassa Drums: Retention and Invention in IndoCaribbean Music. By Peter Manuel. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015. [xviii, 268 p. ISBN 9780252038815 (hardcover), $60; ISBN 9780252096778 (e-book), various.] Music examples, figures, notes, glossary, bibliographic references, index.

The culmination of fifteen-plus years of ethnographic fieldwork in the Caribbean, India, and the Indo-Caribbean diaspora, Peter Manuel's Tales, Tunes, and Tassa Drums is an ambitious study of diaspora dynamics with significant implications for contemporary understandings of IndoCaribbean identity and musical traditions, national identity in Trinidad, Guyana, Suriname, and Fiji, and the concept of diaspora itself. Timely and relevant in its topic, scope, observations, and conclusions, it fills a gap in the extant literature on IndoCaribbean musical traditions, specifically with regard to tassa drumming. It also reminds scholars of the relative value of ethnographically-based research methods, specifically description and analysis, and of the need to likewise consider traditional and neotraditional musics in the study of diaspora musics and music making. Certain to be lauded by ethnomusicologists, IndoCaribbean, Caribbean, diaspora, and cultural studies scholars alike for its methodical and critical approach, rich documentation, insightful analysis, and significant scholarly contribution, Tales, Tunes, and Tassa Drums will find a welcome home among libraries at both research and teaching institutions.

While focusing predominantly on the Indo-Trinidadian context, Manuel cautiously ventures to provide a more encompassing, though not overgeneralizing, assessment of musical retentions, continuities, and innovations among ethnic Indian communities in the Caribbean, Fiji, and elsewhere. Descendants of indentured laborers brought from the Bhojpuri-speaking region of North India to the Caribbean and Fiji by the British and Dutch during the early and mid-nineteenth century, Indo-Caribbeans are today among the most populous ethnic groups in Trinidad, Suriname, Guyana, and Fiji. The rich and diverse musical traditions evident today in the Bhojpuri diaspora, as Manuel illuminates in this comparative study, reflect the specific social, historical, and political contexts that inform the historical trajectories of each respective community. Yet Manuel concerns himself not so much with examining the similarities and differences within the diaspora itself, but rather with assessing the relationship between the traditions commonly practiced throughout the diaspora and their contemporary counterparts in the Bhojpurispeaking region of North India. Along the way, he draws on the comparative perspectives provided by the diasporic context to provide even further insight as to how and why certain traditions flourished, stagnated, or transformed in the diaspora.

Well-organized and written, the book consists of six chapters that collectively survey and compare contemporary North Indian Bhojpuri and Indo-Caribbean musical culture, examine the Indo-Caribbean encounter with the "great" pan-regional traditions of northern India and mass-mediated musics hailing from India and the Afro-Creole Caribbean, and assess the vitality and relative uniqueness of Bhojpuri-derived culture in the Indo-Caribbean diaspora. Specifically, chapter 1 orients readers to the Indo-Caribbean Bhojpuri diaspora as well as to the major issues and questions addressed in the study: namely, how scholars understand and approach diaspora, syncretic popular musics, and the question of Indo-Caribbean identity as it relates to North India and the Caribbean. Chapters 2 and 3 systematically address the origins and trajectories of the oral, text-driven folk genres of Alha, birha, and the Ramayan, currently practiced in the Indo-Caribbean diaspora, and the musical entities of chowtal and dantal. In chapter 4, Manuel considers the impact of mass-mediated musics from both India and the Afro-Creole Caribbean on Indo-Caribbean musical traditions and music making post-indentureship, including the influence of film music and panregional Hindustani devotional songs on wedding songs, Kabir-panth music, and Ramayan singing. Perhaps most significant with regard to the overall arguments posited in this study, chapter 5 documents and analyzes tassa drumming in both India and the Indo-Caribbean diaspora, discussing its origins, present manifestations, performance styles, and social contexts. In the final chapter, Manuel considers the study's implications for our understanding of diaspora, Indo-Caribbean music and culture (especially as they relate to AfroCreole culture), and the notion of Caribbean creolization.

Of interest to ethnomusicologists and diaspora studies scholars is Manuel's critical categorization of the different types of diaspora (classical, amnesiac, standard, transnational, and isolated transplant; p. 12), which he bases on the degree or type of relationship between a given diasporic community and its ancestral homeland. The Indo-Caribbean case, notes Manuel as a result of his observations, represents an "isolated transplant" diaspora in the IndoCaribbean culture up to the mid-twentieth century, one that developed primarily in isolation from North Indian Bhojpuri culture following the end of the indentureship period in the early twentieth century. As he argues throughout the book, however, this does not mean that Indo-Caribbean culture is any less Indian or that it is creolized, as in the Afro-Caribbean case. Instead, he notes, Bhojpuri cultural traditions were able to flourish in new soil, though largely through the consolidation of Old-World traditions (p. 12). Tassa drumming, as he convincingly shows through his analysis, constitutes a prime example of one such neotraditional music practice that has flourished in bringing together and streamlining other related Bhojpuri traditions in the diaspora, rather than as a result of direct input from India. As a result, although tassa drumming is indeed still practiced in the Bhojpuri region of North India, tassa in the IndoCaribbean diaspora is entirely distinct in its performance style and sound. He likens this cultural process to what linguists refer to as a koine (a language formed through the consolidation of related languages) rather than to creolization (a syncretic process that brings together disparate elements to make something new). This observation leads Manuel to assert (with a bit more passion than he cares to admit) that Indo-Caribbean culture is indeed distinct from both Bhojpuri North Indian and Afro-Creole culture and that, therefore, the phenomenon of creolization, which many scholars have, with good intentions, attempted to extend to Indo-Caribbeans, is not applicable or appropriate. Rather, Indo-Caribbean culture, in its dynamic process of consolidation and revitalization of related survivals and retentions in the Bhojpuri diaspora, must best be considered more akin to a koine.

This argument will be of particular importance to scholars of Indo-Caribbean and Afro-Caribbean history and culture, as it has significant political implications for how Indo-Caribbeans are understood and received relative to Afro-Creoles and the nation. As Manuel notes in chapter 1, Indo-Caribbeans, though substantial in population, are socially and politically marginalized within the respective nations constituting the Bhojpuri Indo-Caribbean diaspora. Where the national imaginary is idealized in terms of creolization and creole (meaning Afro-Creole) culture, IndoCaribbeans are, by definition, excluded from participating in national culture. Hence the desire by scholars to assert the essence of Indo-Caribbean culture as fundamentally creole. Yet, as Manuel points out, doing so is not unproblematic given the marginalizing effect the concept of creolization, as adopted to connote AfroCaribbean national culture, practices, and values, has historically had on East Indians. As Manuel poignantly asks, "Is it not possible for East Indians to be dynamic and innovative without necessarily being douglarized [a pejorative term referring to East Indian assimilation to mainstream creole/Afro-Creole values and practices]?" (p. 17). Indeed, this study may be understood as Manuel's contribution to this question. Although he distances himself from the contested political dimensions of this issue, his scholarly observations and conclusions nonetheless allow him to assert with a certain degree of authority that, yes, IndoCaribbeans may indeed be celebrated on their own terms.

Tales, Tunes, and Tassa Drums is a remarkable study that will be of great interest to scholars and students of Indo-Caribbean, Caribbean, and diaspora culture studies. Methodical in its approach, well-organized and written, and convincingly argued, this book is certain to become a model for similar diaspora studies in the future, making it a must for academic libraries in research institutions. Furthermore, its rich ethnographic content and music analysis make it an excellent classroom resource that is likewise to be of value to libraries of teaching institutions. Whether for research or teaching, Tales, Tunes, and Tassa Drums is destined to be well-received and much-consulted in the years to come.

Francisco D. Lara

Memphis, TN