| Remo Fernandes and Denise Belfon - Reply to "Indian Man":
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In the 2004 Soca Monarch Competition, a crowd favourite was Afro-Trinidadian
Denise Belfon a.k.a. Saucy Wow. Growing up watching Mastana Bahar and Indian films on television,
claiming to be fascinated by Hindi cinema, Belfon, a former beauty queen, had picked up
Indian melodies and dance styles which included intricate head movements from classical
Indian dance. Clad in a glittering blue sari which she drapes herself, and surrounded by
chutney dancers, Belfon, who did a popular English/Bhojpuri re-mix of Sonny Mann's Lotay La
in 1996 and who - singing in Hindi/Bhojpuri - also contests at present in the Chutney Monarch
Competition, comes onstage to the beat of a musical phrase from the Hindi film Takshak (Govind Nihalani, 1999). This beat heralds Belfon's hit song I am looking for an Indian Man.
In her high-energy performance, Belfon casts off her sari and emerges in orange tights as she
proceeds to wine down the house. While for decades male calypsonians had sung about the
exotic Indian woman, representing her as the normative feminine, this was the very first time
that an African woman was representing in music a desire for the Indian man. And in doing so,
performing an implicit critique of normative Creole Trinidadian masculinity
Remo's Reply suggested that not knowing how to wine made him her "Indian man from India"
(rather than from Penal or Port of Spain). As his lyrics indicate, he is "One hundred per
cent", "genuine" and "unadulterated", with "no additional flavour". The cultural risks of
entering a conversation about Trinidadian masculinity with descriptions such as these can
be immense. In proclaiming the Indian from India as the answer to Denise's prayers, Remo's
lyrics almost verge on a disavowal of the specific history of Trini Indians. But the humour
of his lines lie in how they gesture to his own, often challenged, claim to Indianness in
India as someone from a former Portuguese colony, Goa. Nowhere else in our journey did he
capture so profoundly his sense of connection with East Indians in the Caribbean, both joint
heirs to the formations of modernity rendered illegitimate by the narratives of nationalism
in India. |
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