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Book Review
Cultural encounter
NALINI RAJAN
MOBILIZING INDIA — Women, Music, and Migration Between India and Trinidad: Tejaswini Niranjana; Duke University Press, London. $ 21.95.
Most postcolonial academics working in English tend to operate in a North-South context, comparing, favourably or unfavourably, cultural practices in India with those operating in the U.K. or the U.S. This book, however, presents a radical departure from the norm by presenting a South-South conversation, riddled with contextual complexities and mediated by the author. For example, Tejaswini Niranjana analyses the interaction between the Trinidadian chutney-soca performer, Drupatee Ramgoonai and her India Indian counterpart from Goa, Remo Fernandes, who collaborates with Denise Belfon on a song called "Looking for an Indian man". As Niranjana points out: "The `Indian man' created by Remo's reply [`I'm an Indian man from India'] to Denise Belfon claims representative as well as parodic authority in relation to India even as he positions himself as a daring caricature in Trinidad." At times, the Trinidadian Rikki Jai plays film songs from India that Remo does not recognise — thereby raising questions about the "Indianness" of both singers.
Four themes
This fascinating book on mobilising India in the Caribbean (and correspondingly, disavowing the subaltern Trinidadian Indian in India) explores four related and complex themes. These include exchanges between the Trinidadian East Indians and the India Indians, the construction of the "Indianness" of the former and its impact on the latter, the sexual representation of the Trinidadian East Indian woman, and the deployment of her body in the popular fusion of African and Indian musical practices, like "chutney soca", short for "soul" and "calypso". The unfamiliarity of the Trinidadian East Indian context for the India Indian, claims Niranjana, has something to do with the unfamiliarity of the bodies and tongues of the music performers. The issue of "authenticity" is thus recast onto the register of "difference".
To my mind, the best part of the book is chapter three, "Take a Little Chutney, Add a Touch of Kaiso": The Body in the Voice. Why does chutney-soca arouse the extreme audience reaction of either ecstatic celebration or hostile denunciation, in spite of the fact that most Caribbean East Indians do not understand the raunchy, lewd Hindi or Bhojpuri parts of the largely Trinidadian English lyrics? It is not just the double meaning of the words that has such an effect; there is something that spills out of the boundary of the lyrics or the mellifluousness of the tone into "pure signification", giving body and materiality to the singing voice.
Subaltern study
Niranjana sets the pace early on for what is to follow. In the opening chapter, she provides a history of indentured labour in the Caribbean and establishes the subaltern location of the Trinidadian East Indian female, who has been berated for her supposed depravity, in equal measure by the 19th-century Christian missionaries, by leaders such as Mahatma Gandhi, and even by the Hindu Sangh Parivar, which refuses to treat the Caribbean Indian (both male and female) on a par with the "superior" Non-Resident Indian of Europe or North America. Curiously enough, given the largely lower caste composition of the Indian migrants to Trinidad, the major conflicts here are not on the basis of caste or community but of race.
For the most part, Niranjana succeeds in her project of weaving together the four major themes in this book. Occasionally, she raises controversial issues. For instance, the author believes that the Indian journalist, Vir Sanghvi, exemplifies secular liberalism, because he expresses "incomprehension and horror ... at the spectacle of one who publicly displays religious identity, such as the Hindu East Indian." Surely Sanghvi cannot be seen as representing the many strands of liberal secularism, one of which is the influential liberal multicultural theory of the 1990s?
However, issues such as these do not seriously affect the structural framework of the author's major themes. By recording — at times, facilitating — the interaction between two unlikely partners, the Trinidadian East Indian and the India Indian, Niranjana exposes the vacuity of the Hindu Sangh Parivar's label of "authenticity" for the latter group. This book should have tremendous appeal for those interested in cultural politics both in the Caribbean and in India.
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