Caribbean connect
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`My research in the Caribbean has made me rethink many things about questions of culture and identity in India,' Tejaswini Niranjana tells GOWRI RAMNARAYAN.
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K.V. SRINIVASAN
Exploring feminist and translation theories: Niranjana.
She began writing poetry, and has Englished texts from Kannada including Phaniyamma. Her Siting Translation (1992) examined how translation is deployed in socio-political-literary contexts, in history, philosophy and education, to renew and perpetuate colonial domination. The book slammed A.K. Ramanujan for relying on formalist and modernist frameworks inappropriate for the poetry he was translating in Speaking of Siva. TEJASWINI NIRANJANA called for drastic rethinking in order to use translation as a tool of resistance. Other publications include Interrogating Modernity (with P.Sudhir and Vivek Dhareshwar). With Sawyer, Rockefeller and Homi Bhabha Fellowships, Niranjana continued to explore feminist and translation theories, as also the media, cinema and music. Besides teaching in the Universities of Chicago and Hyderabad, she has lectured in the West Indies, Brazil, South Africa, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, the U.S and the U.K. She is now Director, the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, Bangalore. Niranjana talked about her soon-to-be-published book Mobilising India at the national conference on postcolonial studies in Ethiraj College for Women, Chennai. The research project had her taking singer Remo Fernandes to the Caribbean to interact with local artistes. This year will record the results in an album. Excerpts from an interview:
What got you interested in the Caribbean?
I had a conventional English education but when assigned to teach Commonwealth literature in Hyderabad University, I put together Caribbean/African writing rather than Canadian or Australian. An instinctive, not an informed choice. It was a time of political turmoil in Andhra Pradesh. I saw how the underprivileged students connected with the new texts, as they didn't with Milton and Keats. The questions raised by these texts in relation to language were relevant to us. My interest increased and widened with theirs. With the Homi Bhabha Fellowship I stayed in Jamaica for four months. It changed my life. What happens when a Third World scholar travels to another Third World space? What does it mean to have knowledge not inflected by those endless, invariable comparisons with the West?
Did you have to start with the history of indentured labour?
Partly. The Blacks had left the plantations after the abolition of slavery. Shiploads of mainly agricultural labourers from U.P. and Bihar replaced them, lured by false promises. At the end of the term, they were offered free return passage if they worked for another five years, or given swampy lands in lieu of return fare. Many stayed on. But for decades the growing Indian population was seen as migrant, not permanent. Today's two million Indian population is one percent more than the African Indian.
Did the races intermarry? And what about the caste system?
Few intermarriages. They say in Trinidad "you became a Brahmin by boat". On landing you could claim any caste. If you knew a few prayers — in Bhojpuri, not Sanskrit — you said you were a Brahmin. The system is not as rigid as in India. However, Africans are seen as lower caste! A lot of domestic violence in Trinidad, but may be not for the same reasons as here. Because of the history of sex ratio disparity among Indians, women had multiple partners, and developed a different idea of independence than women of their age and generation in India.
Does colour play a part in the social hierarchy?
No. Hair is the marker. People who have straight hair are believed to be of Indian origin. But we are also into colour textures here. A C.L.R. James short story describes a woman as so black that she couldn't have been African. And a Muslim woman told me about a ruckus over a cousin's marrying a Black Muslim.
Do East Indians feel superior to Africans?
People of Indian origin, although not from upper castes, will mobilise the ancientness of Indian culture to claim superiority. In indentureship over slavery, Indians were paid wages, allowed to keep their languages, religion and music. In the Black Power Movement (1970) the Blacks said, let's recover our culture like the Indians. Since Africans had their cultural memory completely erased, they invent African names and dress. Then the Indians said, let's recover Indian culture like them.
The major source of this culture is Bollywood. Why do East Indians claim this `low' culture, instead of what is perceived as the ancient classical `high' culture, as do NRIs in other nations?
Classical culture is seen as Western, and Caribbean nationalism rejects it as belonging to the colonisers. After independence there were attempts to syncretise a multicultural tradition. Hindi movies supply the Indian elements, but in the Caribbean, they detach the visual product in cinema (which they're not very happy with), from the music. Snatches from Lata Mangeshkar, Mohammad Rafi and A.R. Rahman are happily integrated into Caribbean music.
Any harkening back to the motherland among East Indians?
No. There's a song where the girl tells her lover, `don't try to reach the Indian in me, I belong to the Caribbean'. The attempt to build an Indian culture may claim to be reaching back to a past, but there is no past to reach back to, it's all gone, little memory left. Building museums of indenture ship is important, some even celebrate indentureship as the arrival of Indians in Trinidad, escaping from miseries in India. They say Indian is a Trinidadian identity and have developed a culture of their own. I'm trying to argue further that if we begin to recognise those developments as Indian culture, our own sense of who we are is going to change. I hope the kind I of work I do on Trinidad will have an impact on the way I think about cultural questions in India.
Didn't you say that in the Caribbean the public and the private spheres are saturated with music? What is the Indian contribution?
Even political interventions are made through music! Among Indians, songs, in a mixture of Indian dialects including English, mark all childbirth, marriage or funeral. Bhajans are garbled; no one knows the meaning. Chutney songs or spicy songs, with a smattering of Hindi words, have been adopted by Trinidadian Africans, who participate enthusiastically in chutney competitions. The sokah was born when a major African singer — Ras Shorty I — inculcated Indian rhythms with dholak and tabla. (His famous "Om shanti om" was stolen by the Indian film industry). Later Africans called it soca, a blend of soul and calypso.
Any culture shocks in the process of these discoveries?
Having grown up in an anti-apartheid, pro-African ethos in India, I was disturbed to be claimed by some Trinidadian Indians who wanted to mobilise me against the Africans. My book began there. Why couldn't I recognise them as Indians? Is it because they are part of what India had to cast out in order to become who we are? What were the stakes of nationalism in relation to indentureship? Also, 70 years of living in the Caribbean had made the East Indians modern, but not elitist as modernity is understood in India. With my interest in questions of masculinity, femininity and the image of the Indian woman as it emerges in the 19th and early 20th Centuries, I began to argue that what we are in India depends very heavily on what we have disowned.
My research in the Caribbean has made me rethink many things about questions of culture and identity in India.
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