| Chapter 1
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Hanuman statue and temple built in South Indian style, not common in Trinidad, whose indentured population mostly came from northern India
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This chapter explores the possibility of contrasting the formation of the "Indian" in the
subaltern diaspora with the hegemonic construction of "Indians" in India, focusing on the
indentured migration to the Caribbean in the 19th and early 20th centuries. In this particular
attempt at comparative research, the history of the context being compared is profoundly
entangled with my own, in ways that have been made invisible in the postcolonial present.
One cannot, for example, talk about Trinidad without talking about India, over forty percent
of the island's population being of subcontinental origin, the descendants of indentured
labourers taken there between 1845 and 1917. The obverse, however, is clearly not true; one
can talk endlessly about India without the Caribbean, or most other third world regions,
including India's closest neighbours, featuring in the conversation. What difference might it
make to how we in India think about our past - and perhaps how we think about our present as
well - to reflect on that which binds India to a west that is not the West? This chapter
introduces the protagonists of the book, "Indians" from the subaltern diaspora to the
Caribbean who first went there as indentured labourers in the mid-nineteenth century. A
background is provided for understanding the kinds of cultural transformations which the
subaltern migrants underwent. |
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