Why do people from trinidad look indian

It seems the web browser you're using doesn't support some of the features of this site. For the best experience, we recommend using a modern browser that supports the features of this website. Her new book, Callaloo or Tossed Salad? By redefining the term "creole" to include the Indo-Trinidadian community, Professor Munasinghe portrays Indo-Trinidadians as active creators of a unique, hybrid culture. Asia Society spoke with the scholar from her office at Cornell University.

Can you explain the title of your book? Why is food a good metaphor to discuss the debate between pluralism and homogenization in Trinidad? The use of food as metaphor for the nation is not limited to Trinidad but characteristic of most nationalist discourses. Trinidadians often use the local West Indian dish "callaloo" as a metaphor for the nation. This stew, made from the leaves of the dasheen bush and flavored with okra and coconut milk, serves as a fitting image for their nation because it conveys both native origins in the New World and the containment of diverse elements within a single unit.

However, many Indo-Trinidadian cultural and political activists I spoke with during my fieldwork in and took exception to this metaphor for the Trinidad nation. They argued that since the ingredients making up the "callaloo" are boiled down to an indistinguishable mush, the original ingredients lose their respective identities and blend into one homogeneous taste. They disapproved of this metaphor because it represented an extreme level of blending or "mixture. Thus the food metaphors of the callaloo and the tossed salad for the nation of Trinidad and Tobago convey very different ideas of mixture -- callaloo depicting a process of mixture that produces homogeneity and tossed salad signifying the co-existence of diverse elements in pluralism.

Indo-Trinidadians who are intent on preserving what they believe to be their unique and distinct "Indian" identity are against a "callaloo" nation because of the extent of biological and cultural mixing signified by this metaphor.

Can you discuss the historical circumstances of Indian immigration to Trinidad? When did this movement occur and what factors influenced it? When the slaves were emancipated in the British Caribbean in , the planters looked for alternative supplies of docile and servile labor that could replace the labor of the former slaves. Planters claimed that emancipation caused a labor shortage in many of the British Caribbean colonies such as Trinidad.

However, I, along with a host of other scholars, argue that it was not that labor was in short supply but that former slaves were no longer willing to labor under the terms offered by planters. Therefore, planters had to look for a controllable as opposed to "free" labor force to work in the sugar plantations.

Some colonies such as Trinidad were particularly well poised to realize huge profits with increased sugar cultivation because many of their resources were still unexploited. The planters and the British Government instituted what some academics such as Hugh Tinker have labeled "a new system of slavery," or indenture, to provide the planters with the desired labor.

After brief experimentation with different groups, India, a British colony, became the major source of this alternative labor supply. India was a suitable source because India's population was vast, the majority accustomed to agricultural labor under tropical conditions, and because the country was under British control there was no need for negotiations with foreign authorities. Living conditions were also grim for many Indians in the nineteenth century due to famine, disease, overpopulation and the increasing encroachment of the East India Company.

As a result, many Indians were destitute and looked to opportunities outside of India in order to improve their impoverished lives. Between and when indenture was abolished due to pressure from Indian nationalists approximately , Indians came to Trinidad. Did any of these differences survive? While the common perception is that Indian immigrants constituted a homogenous group because the vast majority who settled in Trinidad came from the densely populated central plain of the Ganges in northeast India the United Provinces, Oudh, Bihar and Orissa , they were in fact a very diverse group characterized by religious, caste, linguistic and regional differences.

While it is hard to pinpoint a date for the attenuation of these distinctions, once in Trinidad this originally diverse population of Indians developed into a relatively homogeneous group with the emergence of a common language, Bhojpuri, the standardization of Hinduism, the attenuation of the caste system whereby only certain distinctions now carried valence, and changes in the family structure in which certain features of the joint-family structure still persisted, but in modified form.

Religious divisions between Hindus and Muslims, caste distinctions between Brahmins and Chamars and to a lesser extent, regional differences between the few "Madrasis" South Indians and the rest of the Indo-Trinidadians whose ancestral origins lie in northern India, still persist today.

What role does India play in the Indo-Trinidadian imagination? How much contact is there between India and the Indo-Trinidadian community? Has there been travel and exchange in both directions? India plays a large role in the Indo-Trinidadian imagination.

While Indo-Trinidadians insist on their commitment and loyalty to the nation of Trinidad and Tobago, they also express pride in their Indian ancestry.

They don't see these two identities as necessarily in contradiction. Identification with India heightened in the s when the independence movement in India added vigor to the Indo-Trinidadian consciousness. As early as the s, young Indo-Trinidadian intellectuals began staging island-wide demonstrations in support of India's demand for freedom.

Public meetings held in Indo-Trinidadian majority areas opened and closed with Indian patriotic songs and "Vande Matram," the Indian national anthem. Many of the Indo-Trinidadian organizations formed during this period, like the India Club, were intent on spreading knowledge about India and things Indian. Wealthy Indo-Trinidadians visited India and contributed generously to famine relief funds.

Their passage to the Caribbean was usually paid by the employers and on completion of the contract, they could return to India at the expense of their employer, or settle in their new homeland. In reality, the conditions of work were oppressive, the wages paltry and the agreements were never honoured. The first boat that arrived on May 30, , with Indian indentured labourers in Trinidad had adult passengers on board who had travelled more than 36, km over days.

Almost 1. Many of them never returned. Primarily, they came from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar but a few were from Bengal and the region then called Madras. Their descendants are now the largest ethnic group in Trinidad. Shamshu Deen is the fifth generation of an Indian family that migrated from Bihar, and at family gatherings he would often spend time with the elderly, listening to their stories about crossing continents.

There are 20 volumes of the general registers in the National Archives of Trinidad, which document everything about Indians who travelled during the year period of the indenture system. These are the only source of this information. The document Shamshu Deen found revealed that his ancestor was an indentured immigrant called Mohammed Mookti who arrived in Trinidad in His maternal great-great-grandparents left India because of the outbreak of plague.

I used to do a little documentary beforehand, talk to the parents, do a map of the route their great-grandparents took, get photos, trace who had which son and so on, till I got to the bride and the groom. This gave me access to hundreds of family histories in Trinidad. Apart from scrutinising information from different sources like the General Registers of Immigrants, the National Archives of Trinidad and academic studies, he also met a few survivors of the indenture system.

Sometimes over a century old, they shared faint memories, which Shamshu Deen then backed up with research and verification. When people came to Trinidad, they mostly had their first name documented. So, in a register that documents more than 1 lakh people, sometimes there would be with the same name.

Then additional details like caste, district, etc. After years of hard work, Shamshu Deen finally travelled to India and traced his family to Ghazipur and Azamgarh in Uttar Pradesh, where he found three sets of relatives and a few in Bihar. Since then, Shamshu Deen has helped more than families in Trinidad and Tobago and nearly 10 families in India find their loved ones in the three countries.

He went back after the abolition of the indenture system and built a school in his village. He then came back to Trinidad.

The process starts with visits to the record centre or the collectorate. The land records of villages and areas identified from the indenture system are located and Tiwary gets on the tedious job of finding if the father or the ancestor identified owned any land. If he did, Tiwary traces the evolution of land titles up to about 50 years ago when present village elders can direct him to the current owners.

It brings joy to so many people. The success of fieldwork and locating the families in India depends on how accurate and detailed information has been gathered from the case studies in Trinidad. In Trinidad, I get far more information on family history from women than men, starting from my mother.