| Chapter 5
|
|
|
|
Ever since Bala Joban (Childhood, Youth) (Baburao Patel, 1934), the first Indian film to be
shown in Trinidad, arrived in 1935, East Indians have continued to be fascinated by this
manifestation of "Indian culture". Calypso and the newer soca are important musical genres in
a spectrum that includes chutney and chutney-soca, forming a crucial arena of cultural-political
intervention. This chapter will discuss how all of these genres draw on Hindi film music,
marking yet another area where "Indians" and "Africans" are engaged in crafting Trinidadian
cultural forms. As Paul Gilroy amongst others has suggested, music is arguably the most
significant cultural practice in areas of African hegemony in the New World. So much so that
even in a country like Trinidad, which has a population of "Indians" more than equal to that
of "Africans", Hindi film as visual product is downplayed in favour of film music which seems
to have played for decades a crucial role in the formation of "Indian" identities. The Hindi
films themselves have aroused a host of ambivalent responses amongst East Indians, while the
songs and their many "versions" continue to circulate in diverse spaces, including Creole-dominated
ones. |
| |
|
|
|
