Indians in New Worlds: Mauritius and Trinidad
Thomas Hylland Eriksen
Social and Economic Studies, no. 1, 1992
[Image]
For the 'sons of the soil', there could be
liking, even respect; the 'noble savage' aura
[Image] was sometimes painted around Malays, Burmese,
Fijians. With the Creole blacks, there was an
About this site acknowledgedment of a partially shared language
and folk culture, in dance and music. But the
[Image] Indians were almost always stigmatized as the
dregs of their country: lowborn, even criminal.
Relational (Tinker 1974, p. 221)
index
Introduction
[Image]
Trinidad & Tobago and Mauritius are poly-ethnic
Thematic index island-states with large population segments of Indian
origin. The other major ethnic categories are in both
[Image] societies of African descent. Brought to the islands
during the British colonial indentureship scheme from ca.
Alphabetic 1840 to ca. 1910, the Indians were in both societies
index politically marginal until the electoral reforms of the
post-war years. There are both similarities and
[Image] differences in the collective situation of Indians in
Trinidad and Mauritius. Both of the societies are,
Recent nevertheless, remarkably peaceful at the inter-ethnic
level. In this article, I shall compare the respective
positions of Indians in the two nation-states, paying
[Image] especial attention to the relationship between the wider
socio-cultural contexts of daily life and national
World politics.1
Three analytical perspectives
A fair number of studies dealing with Mauritius and
Trinidad describe the ways in which the descendents of
Indian immigrants in these societies "preserve their
culture" and "reproduce their social institutions". Two
well-known anthropological monographs representative of
this approach are Morton Klass's study of Trinidad (Klass
1961) and Burton Benedict's study of Mauritius (Benedict
1961), both of which were based on village fieldwork in
the late 1950s. Notwithstanding their merits, this type
of studies could be justly criticised for being one-sided
and misleading in that they tend to neglect the very
considerable interaction taking place between the
descendants of Indians and members of other ethnic
categories in the societies under investigation. This
interaction, which has contributed to shaping the total
socio-cultural environments in which Indians and
non-Indians alike move, is constituted partly by
inter-ethnic interfaces, partly by social contexts where
ethnicity is irrelevant.
Other researchers, aware of the shortcomings of such
mono-ethnic community studies, have emphasised the
so-called poly-ethnic nature of societies such as
Trinidad and Mauritius, and have at least on the level of
programmatic statements called for studies of
inter-ethnic relations in such societies. This
sociological school, where M.G. Smith and Lloyd
Braithwaite are among the more prominent names, has
implicitly and sometimes explicitly viewed the East
Indians of Caribbean societies as ethnic minorities with
typical minority problems. Some, among them Braithwaite
(1975), define their most serious problem as being one of
adaptation to the host society (which is, in the
Caribbean, dominated by Afro-American and European
culture), while Smith and others have taken the view that
Indian culture and social organisation are in crucial
ways incompatible with the dominant culture, and that
conflict is bound to arise in any plural society, perhaps
particularly in those recognising the rights of
minorities and trying to treat its citizens equally
(Smith 1965; see also Clarke 1986; Serbin 1987; see
Eriksen 1991c, for a brief critique of this perspective).
Such research strategies and theoretical perspectives
have serious limitations, provided the aim of analysis is
to understand internal social and cultural processes in
the societies seen as total systems. Notably, the actual
situation in which "diaspora Indians" find themselves,
particularly regarding political strategies and identity
management, should be examined. What is sometimes
referred to, simplistically, as the cultural adaptation
of diaspora Indians, is better viewed as the ongoing
interaction between Indian and non-Indian social and
cultural systems, where values, norms and forms of
organisation are continuously negotiated and where the
cultural differences within a statistically defined
"population segment" or an "ethnic group" may be of
greater significance than the systematic differences
obtaining between the categories. Finally, inter-ethnic
contexts can never be reduced simply to either conflict
or compromise. While Indian communities of the
"diaspora"2 are conditioned, culturally and socially, by
the "host society", the influence exerted by Indians
themselves on the societies in question is never
negligible, and lines of communication and power are
always two-ways, although power may, of course, be
asymmetrically distributed. It is possible to be a West
Indian East Indian, as Naipaul (1973) once put it.
The outcome of this ongoing process, while not
necessarily a melting-pot in every respect, is a
socio-cultural environment where members of different
ethnic categories share some fields of interaction, where
some fields of interaction are kept closed along ethnic
lines (this is what one may, following Barth, 1969, refer
to as the maintenance of ethnic boundaries), and where a
third, variable area of interaction belongs to an
ambiguous grey zone as far as the reproduction of
inter-ethnic shared meaning is concerned. There is
nevertheless nothing to suggest that ethnic boundaries in
Trinidad or Mauritius will break down absolutely in the
near future, although they continuously change,
historically, geographically and situationally; in
symbolic content and in social relevance. This implies
that a great number of inter-ethnic situations are
subject to constant negotiation, and there is always a
large number of societal factors which influence the
nature of these encounters. We need, therefore, to take
daily, apparently trivial inter-ethnic encounters
seriously. If we are able to fully understand why there
is say, a disagreement between a Negro and an Indian over
a matter relating to say, a particular government policy,
then we may have understood something very profound about
the nature of ethnicity and social classification in
general, thanks to the indexicality of social action on
the one hand, and on the dependence of politicians for
support in parliamentary democracies such as Trinidad and
Mauritius on the other hand. The daily encounters between
members of different ethnic groups constitute the
fundamentals of ethnicity. Had there not been firm,
widely shared perceptions of differences between Indians
and blacks in Trinidad or Mauritius, then politicians,
employers and opportunists would never have been able to
exploit ethnic cleavages in the population, simply
because there would have been none. It would be foolish
to pretend that such differences do not exist, but it
would be equally untenable to treat them as givens.
Although public discourse about ethnicity in Mauritius
and Trinidad frequently focuses on conflicts between
blacks and Indians, conflicts are not an inevitable
outcome of the widespread inter-ethnic contacts, whether
in Trinidad, in Mauritius or elsewhere. Whether or not a
given situation leads to conflict along ethnic lines
depends on a number of situational and contextual factors
which need not be intrinsically connected with ethnicity.
Ethnicity and the definition of Indianness
Indians in a poly-ethnic society outside of India cannot
adequately be viewed simply as Indians. They are Indians
embedded in a particular historical and socio-cultural
context, and this fact is an inextricable part of their
life - even those aspects of their life which pertain to
their very Indianness. A TV beer commercial popular in
Trinidad in the latter half of 1989, which featured a
classical Indian song, thus did not only communicate that
Indians, too, ought to drink this brand of beer. It also
communicated that it is quite legitimate to be Indian,
despite the fact, which every Trinidadian knows, that
public Trinidad is strongly dominated by cultural symbols
and emblems associated with black or Negro New World
culture. An identical commercial, if shown in India or
Mauritius, would have carried a different meaning because
the wider ideological contexts are different. In
Mauritius, Indian cultural messages are so widespread and
so common, on TV and elsewhere, that nobody would notice
such a commercial as being unusual. In Trinidad, as in
Mauritius, it is impossible to forget that one finds
oneself in a cultural environment where one always has to
take the ethnic others into account. The implications for
ethnicity of, on the one hand dominant power structures,
and on the other hand, everyday social contexts, are
different in the two societies, and a main aim of this
article is to explore some of these differences.
When using the term ethnicity, we thereby indicate that
somebody demands to be recognised as culturally
distinctive. We should also remember, however, that
ethnicity also implies that the person in question also
claims the right, on behalf of his or her group, to be
similar to others in certain respects. For had there not
been a perceived similarity between blacks and Indians,
then there could have been no inter-ethnic relationship,
since perceptions of similarity are a necessary condition
for the inter-ethnic contacts which are presupposed by,
and which in an important sense constitute ethnicity. It
is this ambiguity which makes ethnicity such a difficult
topic to study; it is an elusive, yet obviously pervasive
aspect of the shared discourse in a self-proclaimed
poly-ethnic society. Apart from noting that ethnicity
entails the systematic communication of cultural
differences between members of groups acknowledging each
others's cultural distinctiveness, we cannot list
universal, substantial criteria for ethnicity. Ethnicity
may or may not involve conceptions of differences in
"race", religion and/or language; what matters, is
whether differences are commonly agreed upon as being
socially relevant, not whether or not they exist
"objectively".3 In a study from northern Norway, Eidheim
(1971) thus showed that although there were virtually no
"objective cultural differences" between the Norwegians
and the Saami ("Lapps", indigenous population), ethnicity
was important because people acted according to ethnic
stereotypes and thus maintained ethnic boundaries.
Moreover, the actual content of ethnic identities change
historically, the social importance of ethnicity need not
change accordingly. To this topic, the relationship
between cultural content and ethnic identity, I shall
return below.
Ethnicity is always an aspect of a social relationship,
and it thus involves interaction and some shared base for
communication on the part of both groups involved. This
is an important point to make in relation to poly-ethnic
societies because it suggests that ethnicity is not in
principle incompatible with a shared national identity.
The ethnic identity of a single group viewed in
isolation, alas, is like "the sound from one hand
clapping" (Bateson 1980). The Indians of Trinidad, for
example, would not have been Indians in the way they are
unless they had been forced to relate to black, brown,
off-white and white creole culture, and vice versa. This
holds for Mauritius too in situationally similar ways,
but in different political and economic contexts. Now
turning to a comparison between the situation of Indians
in Mauritius and Trinidad, I shall emphasise the national
contexts in which they play a part as Indians - at the
risk of over-emphasising the actual importance of
ethnicity.
The Mauritian national context is in many respects a more
Indian one than the Trinidadian, and I now turn to a
brief account of its genesis and further development.
The advent of the Indo-Mauritians
From the abolition of slavery in 1835 until the end of
World War I, millions of Indians were brought to other
British colonies, particularly plantation colonies, under
the system of indentureship which has been labelled "a
new form of slavery" in Hugh Tinker's (1974) oft-quoted
phrase and which, whether a form of slavery proper or
not, replaced the abandoned system of Negro slavery. The
majority of these indentured labourers hailed from the
north-eastern provinces of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh and
were speakers of Bhojpuri (a spoken language related to
Hindi); substantial numbers also embarked from Madras,
the main port of what is now Tamil Nadu in the south. The
majority of the emigrants were Hindus; a large minority
were Muslims and a smaller minority Christian. Although
the bulk of Indian immigrants to the colonies were field
labourers, small proportions were artisans, traders and
even Hindu pundits. Some, most of them South Indians,
speakers of the Dravidian languages Tamil and Telegu,
left India on their own whim, in order to further their
careers as traders or artisans abroad.4
In four of the colonies to which indentured Indian
labourers were sent, are their numbers sufficiently
substantial for them to vie for political power in the
post-colonial era.5 These four societies, all of them
independent nation-states since the 1960s, are Fiji,
Guyana, Trinidad & Tobago, and Mauritius. Mauritians of
Indian origin constitute the only group of Indian emigrΘs
who have continuously dominated politics in their new
homeland since the electoral reforms introduced in many
of these territories after World War II (see Simmons
1983; Bowman 1990). This is caused by several concurrent
processes, not all of them obvious, and I shall consider
the causes of the political success of Indo-Mauritians
before describing their contemporary political and
cultural situation in some detail.
The political success of Indo-Mauritians
In any political system with functioning parliamentary
institutions, there is strength in numbers. In Mauritius,
people of Indian descent have made up more than half the
population since the 1870s; today, they comprise
approximately 65 per cent of the total population of
roughly one million. In other words, by sheer force of
numbers, it was likely that Indo-Mauritians should play a
major part in national politics after the introduction of
universal suffrage in 1948. This not only meant that
Indians comprised the largest group of voters, but it
also indicated that the size and diversity of the Indian
population enabled them to retain and reproduce forms of
local and domestic organisation advantageous in politics
- in a word, their foci of social organisation were the
family and extended kinship networks, the village and, to
a not negligible extent, caste-based organisation (see
Benedict 1961).
This leads to a second point, namely that the people of
Indian descent in Mauritius were more heterogeneous than
those who settled in the New World. Already under French
rule, in the late 18th century, there were visible
minorities of Indians in the capital Port-Louis; some of
them menial labourers or dockers, others conducting
business on varying scale (St. Pierre 1983 [1773]). Many
of these immigrants, most of whom were Tamils or Indian
Muslims, were creolised during the 19th century; that is,
they converted to Christianity, lost their language and
were absorbed into the emergent coloured middle-class.
But a substantial proportion of these urban migrants have
retained their identity as Indians up to this day, and
this indicates that throughout the history of Mauritius,
and up to this day, there has been an economically
influential group of "respectable" citizens of Indian
descent. Some of these families have exerted an influence
comparable to that of the French planters - and like the
planters, rich urban Muslims are fiercely endogamous and
take great pride in their origins.
Thirdly, geography works in the favour of Indians in
Mauritius, compared to those settled in the New World. In
the islands of the western Indian Ocean, which must in
many other respects be regarded as similar to those of
the Caribbean, a different set of cultural influences are
at work. First, virtually all Mauritians, Indians and
blacks alike, speak a French-based creole language, and
they tend to prefer French to English as a literary
language (although many Indians nowadays prefer English,
this preference being an aspect of their ethnic identity
as Indians; see Eriksen 1990b). Secondly, Mauritius is
too remote from America, geographically and (perhaps
especially) culturally, to have taken part in the black
self-consciousness movement which was very influential in
the Caribbean and the United States in the late 1960s and
1970s. The society as a whole is, in contrast with
Trinidad, more Gallicised than Americanised. Thirdly, the
gravitational pull from India is strongly felt in
Mauritius: it possesses a much stronger Indian flavour
than any society in the New World. India is sufficiently
close for the reasonably affluent to send their sons
there for wives or to become educated, and even
Mauritians of modest means can afford a
once-in-a-lifetime pilgrimage to the land of their
ancestors. The link between India and Mauritius has long
been acknowledged: On his way from South Africa to India,
Mahatma Gandhi, for example, visited Mauritius. Flights
between Bombay and Mauritius are frequent, and the island
receives, among other things, fresh supplies of the most
recent Hindi movies regularly. (A rather sadder aspect of
the intimate links between Bombay and Mauritius is the
soaring growth of drug abuse in the island during the
last decade.)
The content of Mauritian Indianness
Compared with diaspora communities of Trinidad or Guyana,
the Indian community of Mauritius has by and large been
less creolised on the level of cultural notions and daily
practices. The tika can still be seen on the foreheads of
most Mauritian Hindu women, and even in the towns, most
of the married Hindu women rub henna into the partition
of their hair. Half of the many cinemas in Mauritius show
exclusively Indian films with no subtitles, and unlike in
Trinidad, blacks rarely make jokes about "Hindi movies".
Bhojpuri is still spoken fairly widely in the
north-eastern villages and is understood by many blacks
living in these areas, although only elderly, female,
rural Indo-Mauritians now tend to be monolingual in
Bhojpuri. The variant of Bhojpuri spoken in Mauritius is
closer to that spoken in Bihar than the Bhojpuri spoken
in either Fiji, Guyana or Trinidad. The caste system
still exists, although not as a hierarchy of corporate
groups or occupational groups; rather as a "hierarchy of
prestige labels valued at the upper end, devalued at the
lower end and largely ignored in the middle" (Benedict
1965, p. 36). Castes tend not to be endogamous.
This is not to say that there has been little or no
cultural change since the bulk of the indentured
labourers arrived four or more generations ago. An Indian
from India (enn lendien dilend in the vernacular, Kreol)
of my acquaintance thus lamented the shallowness of the
Indo-Mauritian cultural identity. Pointing to what he
called their obsession with money and material riches -
and surely idealising conditions in India - he thought
the Indo-Mauritians unspiritual and superficial. While
more than half of the Indo-Mauritians still have their
source of income in the sugar industry, there are by now
Indo-Mauritians in virtually every profession. Unlike in
Trinidad (and even more unlike Guyana; see LaGuerre
1989), many Indians work in the Mauritian civil service;
an increasing number are business managers in the
thriving Mauritian industry; there are now
Indo-Mauritians in every profession. Interestingly,
several Indo-Mauritian authors write fiction in Hindi and
publish in India.
However, the "diaspora Indians" were just as
underprivileged in Mauritius as anywhere else until after
World War II. The bulk of them were undernourished,
illiterate, impoverished, and were viewed with suspicion
and contempt as primitive pagans by whites, browns,
Chinese and blacks alike. The Indians were perceived as
being culturally more remote from the colonial and creole
ruling classes than the blacks and coloureds, and the
latter were therefore systematically preferred in
virtually all forms of employment except that of field
labourers (Allen 1983).
It is not surprising that this situation was to change
radically when, following Independence, Mauritius was to
be ruled by Indians. Since then (actually, since the
political and educational reforms of the late 1940s and
early 1950s), their situation has improved very rapidly
in politics, education and the economic system. As
mentioned, their rapid ascendancy can partly be accounted
for by plain statistics: Since Indians formed an
overwhelming demographic majority, they could never be
neglected, and since many were not indentured labourers,
the community could create its indigenous leaders with
adequate command of the dominant codes, since the
beginning of indentureship. Seewosagur Ramgoolam, the
first prime minister of Mauritius, was active in politics
from the 30s to the early 80s. In a sense, he holds a
position in Mauritian nationalist ideology comparable to
the combined positions of the national heroes Arthur
Cipriani (a white Fabian socialist politician of the
1930s) and Eric Williams (prime minister 1956-81) in
Trinidad. Mauritians are in other words accustomed to
being led by Hindus.
Political and cultural contexts of ethnicity
The strong position of Indians in many - but not all -
fields of Mauritian public life has put the cohesion of
the community under strain. Politically, the community
has been split since the Indian civil war in the late
40s: that is, the Muslims early formed their own party,
the CAM (ComitΘ d'Action Musulman). Cultural differences
between Dravidians (Tamils, Telegus) and Aryans
(especially Biharis; also Marathis and Bengalis) have
also periodically been perceived as important, and at
least the urban Tamils define themselves as non-Indians.
Further, caste divisions also play a part in Mauritian
social life, and caste differences have occasionally been
exploited politically. The caste aspect is also widely
believed to influence policies of employment. For
example, a highly qualified Mauritian woman of my
acquaintance once lamented that she would never get a
high position in the state bureaucracy because she was a
Brahmin. The latest political fragmentation of the
Indo-Mauritians occurred in August, 1988. In an earlier
study of Mauritian ethnicity and nationalism, based on
fieldwork in 1986 (Eriksen 1990a), I had portrayed one of
Mauritius's leading politicians, a Telegu, as a champion
of inter-ethnic cooperation and compromise. Following the
elections of 1987, his power base grew considerably - he
was appointed Chief Whip of the governing MSM party - and
less than a year later, he broke away from the government
and formed an organisation representing Hindu minorities
(Tamils, Telegus and Marathis, altogether about 12% of
the population).
The point to be made here is that political ethnicity
can, in the contexts of contemporary Trinidad and
Mauritius, be meaningfully reduced to a power game where
all actors follow identical rules, and that it therefore
ought to be regarded as a phenomenon relatively
distinctive from individual ethnic identity, which has a
strong element of non-utilitarian symbolic meaning. For
the "objective" cultural differences between a rural
Telegu and a rural North Indian are negligible,
particularly when viewed against the wider background of
the Mauritian cultural complexity, and intermarriage
between the groups has been, and remains, widespread.
"Observable" cultural differences therefore do not enable
us to predict anything about political alignments.
Politics makes strange bedfellows, not least in
Mauritius, where the bulk of the Catholic blacks and the
Indian Muslims have been allied politically since the
1960s. True, the Indians of Mauritius are culturally
heterogeneous, but they tend to share a number of notions
about self and others that effectively set them socially
apart from non-Indian Mauritians. These notions are
embedded in cultural stereotypes, which are part and
parcel of Mauritian culture and can be invoked whenever
deemed necessary and ignored or underplayed if need be.
The Indian standard view of the black is, according to
stereotypical perceptions, that he is lazy, sexually
immoral, disorganised and essentially stupid. The blacks,
or Creoles, on their part, tend to regard the Indians as
being to thrifty, sly and cunning, dishonest and boring
to the extent that they are unable to enjoy the good
things in life.
Stereotypes of this kind, which do lead to a great deal
of tension and uneasiness in inter-ethnic encounters,
nevertheless serve to fix ethnic relationships in social
space, at least at the level of representations or
ideology, and they thereby create a subjective sense of
security and stability as regards cultural identity. They
help reproduce ethnic boundaries in an environment where
spatial boundaries are impossible - where Indians and
blacks may live in the same neighbourhoods.
I have suggested that the cultural differences reproduced
between Indo-Mauritians and black Mauritians are more
socially effective than those being reproduced between
the corresponding groups in Trinidad. Mauritius has been
less strongly exposed to American and British cultural
influences, and has only recently begun its path towards
a total integration into the capitalist world economy.
Ever since Independence, however, Mauritian authorities
have pursued cultural policies aimed at enabling the
diverse ethnic groups to preserve their mutual
differences. The Mahatma Gandhi Institute, a research and
documentation centre, is, despite its name, devoted to
research on the Indian, Chinese and African heritages
alike, and already a wide array of courses and open
lectures at the MGI has taught young Mauritians about
their half-forgotten past. Mauritius is politically a
Hindu-dominated society, however, and it is doubtless
true that the main focus of post-independence historical
research has been on indentureship and Indian history and
society. The school system has also been adapted to the
poly-cultural reality of modern Mauritius. It is now the
right of every pupil to be taught his or her ancestral
language (although many Indo-Mauritians understand
Hindustani and Bhojpuri, only a tiny minority are
literate in Hindi). Among Mauritian Indians, there have
been few conversions to Christianity, but many have
chosen French as their primary vehicle for writing. The
current policies aim to strengthen Hindi vis-α-vis French
and English.
A final example is the Mauritian Emancipation Day, which
is a public holiday where one simultaneously marks the
end of slavery and the arrival of the first Indian
indentured labourers. In Mauritius, it is generally the
blacks who claim that they are being discriminated
against by the state. The government is in the hands of
Indians, and many blacks interpret virtually every
government policy as being "anti-black". An example is
the recent scheme introduced by the state to improve the
situation of smallplanters of sugar cane. Most
smallplanters are of Indian descent, and so blacks tend
to perceive this policy as being pro-Indian. As I shall
indicate below, perceptions of ethnic politics tend to
differ strongly in Trinidad.
East Indians in the West Indies
Trinidadian politics has continuously been dominated by
blacks since the 1950s, and Trinidadian national identity
is closely linked with cultural institutions associated
with the blacks. I have met Trinidadians of non-Indian
origin who, when describing central aspects of
Trinidadian culture, totally ignore the cultural
distinctiveness of the citizens of Indian origin and who,
if asked, regard the Indo-Trinidadian culture as a
"spice"; a subordinate, subservient cultural dependency
of the by-and-large black West Indian society of
Trinidad. This view has been common since colonial times,
when British administrators would write off the
substantial Indian community as "troublemakers", full
stop (see Brereton 1979). Whatever the case may be
Trinidad, unlike Mauritius, is dominated politically by
blacks and coloureds, culturally by North Americans and
local blacks identifying with New World (local,
Caribbean, and/or North American) culture, economically
by local whites and off-whites as well as by foreign
interests. Unlike in Mauritius, where a majority are of
Indian descent, only slightly over 40 per cent of the
Trinidadian population would define themselves as
Indo-Trinidadians. A context very different from the
Mauritian one, it has led to a very different political
situation for the Indians.
The idea of Indianness in Trinidad - as Indo-Trinidadian
cultural self-consciousness - evolved largely during the
1940s and 1950s. The part played by Indian cinema (most
of the cinemas in Trinidad are owned by Indians) and the
dissemination of popular Indian music through mass media,
have clearly been very important aspects of the emergent
self-definition of Trinidadian Indianness, confronting
Indo-Trinidadians with images of India hitherto unknown.
Since the early 1970s, a strong wave of Indian
revitalisation has spread, particularly among young,
well-educated Indo-Trinidadians. With respect to actual
notions and practices, however, it is clear that by and
large, Indians in Trinidad are more creolised than those
in Mauritius, notwithstanding current revitalisation of
Hindu rites (see Vertovec 1990). Many more are Christian
than in Mauritius (although the majority are not), and
many non-Christian Indians have Christian first names.
Food taboos are dealed with in a more relaxed way, the
loss of language is more complete; and Indian women are
more "independent" (many tend to follow a Western pattern
of careering) in Trinidad than in Mauritius. Caste is now
of minor, if any, importance. All of these (and other)
radical changes in the culture and social organisation of
the Indians in Trinidad need not imply that the Indian
community has been more strongly assimilated in Trinidad
than in Mauritius; in fact, if we look at this in a
converse way, it is evident that blacks in Mauritius and
Trinidad alike have adopted a great deal of Indian
practices and notions (to some extent without being aware
of it), without assimilating into the Indian ethnic
group. At any rate, it is obvious that however creolised
the Indo-Trinidadians may be culturally, the group enjoys
a higher degree of political cohesiveness than the
Indo-Mauritians (see Hintzen 1983 for a more complex
picture). Until very recently, there was but one party
representing the bulk of Indo-Trinidadians. The community
was, it may seem, never large and powerful enough to
split (notwithstanding the periodical Muslim support for
the PNM (People's National Movement), which governed
Trinidad & Tobago from 1956 to 1986). A different
explanation would be that the Indo-Trinidadians are in
general less politically active than both their
Afro-Trinidadian and their Indo-Mauritian counterparts,
largely because politics is seen as a black domain in
Trinidad. While many of the Indo-Trinidadians I knew in
1989 would have liked to see the Indian leader Basdeo
Panday as Prime Minister, few believed that this would
come about in the near future. An investigation of the
place of the Indo-Trinidadian in the division of labour
would support this argument. Whereas most
Indo-Trinidadians are still involved in agriculture, an
increasing number are independent businessmen and
professionals - and even among those working on the land,
many run their own farms.
A conspicuous difference from Mauritius is the
comparative absence of Indians from the public service
and politics. In Trinidad, the high-ranking public
servant of Indian origin is still the exception and not
the rule (LaGuerre 1989); in Mauritius, the situation is
certainly different. Despite the massive black political
dominance, and despite the American cultural onslaught
prevailing in Trinidad; and notwithstanding the very
significant effects of these influences on the lifestyles
of Indo-Trinidadians, it is beyond doubt that most
Trinidadians of Indian origins tend to regard themselves
as a kind of Indians. They are locally labelled East
Indians, ostensibly in order to distinguish them from
Amerindians (of whom there are, incidentally, virtually
none in Trinidad).
A New World brand of Indianness
Their Indianness is, however, increasingly a distinctive
New World Indianness; this point was once made by V.S.
Naipaul when he conceded that his approach to the past of
his grandfather has to be the approach of a stranger, and
it is to some extent documented by Nevadomsky (1980,
1983) in his restudy of the village of "Amity", first
studied by Klass (1961) twenty years earlier. In the late
fifties, when Klass carried out his fieldwork, women were
not educated; most families were of the extended type and
residence was usually patrilocal, and there were criteria
relating to caste and religious merit defining the rank
of an individual. Focusing on changes in shared values
and in household structure, Nevadomsky found that social
rank was now derived from income earning potential and
educational attainments; nuclear families were the norm
and in many cases the ideal; patrilocal residence was now
of insignificant duration; marriage partners were usually
chosen by the young people themselves; girls were
educated and their education enhanced their value as
potential wives.
In abstract sociological terms, this change can be
described as a transition from an ascription-based to an
achievement-based form of organisation, and it fits very
neatly with classical sociological theory about the
nature of modernisation seen as the transition from
Gemeinschaft (community) to Gesellschaft (society).
However, such a transition is never as unambiguous as
Nevadomsky seems to suggest, and this is particularly so
in societies where there are several literate cultural
traditions. For as many scholars have noted (for example,
Epstein 1978), the main point to be made about so-called
ethnic melting-pots is that they tend to be non-starters:
They fail to occur. Poles in the USA remain fervently
Polish several generations after their ancestors left
Poland; second-generation Pakistanis in Norwegian cities,
fluent speakers of Norwegian, voluntarily go to Pakistan
to get married; and the Indians of Trinidad emphatically
remain self-professed Indians despite apparently dramatic
changes in their culture and social organisation.
However, their Indianness is a New World Indianness; it
is a peculiar brand of Indianness which has grown out of
the soil of Trinidad, where, for example, a taste for
heavy rock music has become an auspicious sign of modern
youthful Indianness. Additionally, it should be
emphasised that the ethnicity displayed by
Indo-Trinidadians in the context of modern national
society is not necessarily incompatible with the
requirements of the modern nation-state and commodity
market. Seen as an aspect of a total societal formation,
therefore, contemporary Indian ethnicity in Trinidad is
of diminishing relevance for the organisation of national
society. On the other hand, the cultural creolisation of
Indo-Trinidadians need not mean the disappearance of
Indians as an ethnic category. On the contrary, it may
lead to a greater ethnic self-consciousness since
processes of creolisation can be perceived as threats
against Indianness. The emphatic refusal of the bulk of
Indo-Trinidadians to join forces with blacks during the
Black Power uprisings of the early 1970s could be
indicative of the strength of their collective identity.
The leaders of the Black Power movement claimed that
Indians, as non-whites, were black; the Indians retorted
that they were certainly not. In other words, they
preferred not to define themselves as blacks,
notwithstanding the fact that most Indo-Trinidadians are
at least as dark-skinned as many of the leaders of the
U.S. civil rights movement. "Black", of course, is in
this context an ethnic label with connotations to local
Negro culture, not a description of skin colour.
Creolisation, revitalisation and domination
Contemporary analytical perspectives on the
Indo-Trinidadians differ strongly. Whereas, for example,
Nevadomsky (1980, 1983) has emphasised processes of
creolisation, and Vertovec (1990) has focused on ethnic
revitalisation, Baksh (1979) has documented an essential
similarity in representations and practices among blacks
and Indians. In distinguishing between the cultural and
social aspects of ethnicity, as I have done, all three
perspectives may be relevant, and need not contradict
each other. The ethnic categories, black and (East)
Indian, may become more similar and yet more strongly
committed to communicate their mutual differences. In the
Trinidadian context, this takes on the form of Indian
revitalisation because the dominant cultural idioms are
associated with blacks, and because Trinidadian
nationalist symbolism, unlike the Mauritian "pluralist"
nationalism, is associated with the blacks (see Eriksen
1991a, 1991b). National symbols in Trinidad include the
calypso, the steelband and the carnival, all of which are
perceived as urban black institutions.
I have mentioned a number of aspects documenting changes
in Indian culture and society since their arrival in the
West Indies; some, perhaps less immediately visible
aspects of Trinidadian Indianness, also show the impact
of greater cultural system on Indian culture. For
instance, the swastika, a very common religious symbol in
India and Mauritius alike, is almost entirely absent from
Trinidadian mandirs. This, I venture to guess, must be so
because the swastika is associated with Nazism in this
particular cultural context. The local variety of Hosay
celebrations (an annual Muslim feast) has obviously been
shaped by Carnival influence; it is a rhythmic, colourful
and strongly sensual festival, which would surely be
considered a blasphemous feast by Arab fundamentalists.
The popularity of rock music among Indo-Trinidadian
youths, further, is inexplicable unless we look at the
local cultural context. Since locally popular music such
as reggae and soca are regarded as black musical forms,
and since Indian music is frowned upon or laughed at as
inherently silly, Indian youths have to look elsewhere
for a youth culture which is simultaneously non-African
and modern. The cult around rock music enables young
Indians to communicate modernity and non-blackness (their
taste generally goes in the direction of heavy rock,
which is emphatically non-black within the wider
Anglo-American reference system); it is a phenomenon
generated from a variety of sources. Further, there is an
obvious tendency that Indo-Trinidadians prefer cricket to
football (this parallels preferences in India itself),
while wrestling was, in the 1970s, singularly popular
among Indians - not among blacks; and it would be easy to
find other examples showing the ongoing negotiation of
the content of Indianness, seen as systems of contrasts
against local non-Indianness (that is, usually, black
culture).
Indo-Trinidadian minority strategies
Self-conscious members of dominated minorities in
self-proclaimed poly-ethnic societies may communicate
their differences to their surroundings through an array
of ethnic markers; symbols eclectically chosen from their
acknowledged heritage and tailored to the task of
communicating say, Saami identity in a Scandinavian
cultural context. Apart from appearance, which can
scarcely be chosen, the form of dress is clearly the most
visible and most common such marker; and it is probably
the most universally important one. Religious practices
are also powerful ethnic markers. This does not imply
that religion is not a symbolic system with important
meanings in its own right; the point is that it is also a
very efficient way for a community to set itself apart,
socially, politically, and culturally. Some of these
techniques are virtually absent in Trinidad - it is
indeed rare to see an urban Indo-Trinidadian, regardless
of gender, dressed in anything but Western clothes. The
reason is partly that the obvious phenotypical
differences are sufficient to communicate ethnic
distance. Yet, both in religion and in various cultural
practices visible to the surroundings do
Indo-Trinidadians consciously communicate that they are
different. There are also other, less conspicious
techniques employed to communicate cultural difference;
for instance, when the Indo-Trinidadian community
newspaper Sandesh ("News") in an editorial (1 Sept, 1989)
spoke of Independence Day and chose to focus its concern
on the work ethic, only those readers who are familiar
with the public discourse of Trinidad would realise that
the editorial was an implicit attack on what is conceived
of as black culture. The point to be made here is that
Indians in Trinidad, to a greater extent than Indians in
Mauritius, tend to be self-conscious about their
Indianness: it doesn't come naturally, as it were; one
has to decide for oneself that one wants to be a real,
non-creolised Indian, and one must lay strategies in
order to ensure this. Such ethnic revitalisation is often
presumed to follow the spread of capitalism and
bureaucratic institutions, and particularly, the growth
of mass education. As regards the Indo-Trinidadians as
well as the Indo-Mauritians, there is a clear correlation
to this effect. The increased availability of new forms
of knowledge about their own history and their ancestral
land have made reflection about their identity possible.
It has also, incidentally, inhibited the development of a
widespread nostalgia for India; most Indo-Trinidadians
and Indo-Mauritians are well aware that their
great-grandparents left India because of utter poverty,
and that their own lot has improved since. The form of
Indianness developed in the currents of ethnic
revitalisation now prevalent in Trinidad, therefore, is
not intended to replicate the Indianness of India
entirely; for example, there is little interest in
reviving the jatis (caste-based occupational groups) and
panchayats (caste councils), although other aspects of
Hindu religious revival are strong. In the case of the
Afro-Trinidadians, a comparable tendency of ethnic
revitalisation is present, perhaps most strongly
articulated among intellectuals: they realise having lost
their roots and have consciously taken measures to
re-invent them.
In the less thoroughly modernised, and less exposed,
society of Mauritius, by contrast, self-conscious
ethnic-identity movements of "Indo-Mauritianness" and
"Afro-Mauritianness" have a more limited appeal. At least
in the case of the Indo-Mauritians, this is because it is
still possible for a large number of people to live in an
acknowledged Indian way without having to articulate, and
justify, and protect it vis-a-vis the surroundings.6
Ethnic stereotypes in Trinidad are also slightly
different from those prevalent in Mauritius, although the
similarities are more striking. It is true that
Indo-Trinidadians tend to regard blacks as disorganised,
immoral and essentially lazy ("the African wants the
government to do everything for him" is a common kind of
statement); but the great emphasis placed on physical
appearance in the West Indies has inspired a widespread
Indian contempt for the "ugliness" of the blacks; this
notion is virtually unknown in Mauritius.
The thriftiness of Indians is regarded with suspicion by
blacks in Mauritius and Trinidad alike, but in Trinidad,
there is a tendency among some young, urban blacks to
regard young urban Indians as a kind of jet-set of
conspicuous consumers. This view, of course, does not
conform to any widespread view held by Indians. It has
been documented, however, that the average income of
Indians, traditionally lower than that of the blacks, is
now officially identical to the average income of blacks
(Henry 1989). Economically, Indians are collectively
ascending, although more slowly than many urban blacks
believe.
Despite the emergence of growing fields of
cross-ethnically shared meaning in both societies, ethnic
differences remain strong, both at the level of
representations and that of certain practices. There is a
Mauritian saying that if a black has ten rupees, he will
spend fifteen; but if an Indian has ten rupees, he will
spend seven and hoard the rest. Similar notions are also
widespread in Trinidad, and may indeed be quoted by
members of both of the groups in question as an
indication of their cultural superiority. Statistically,
there are systematic differences between the groups in
some respects (although not nearly as strong as commonly
believed). Black households in Trinidad, particularly in
the working class, tend to be unstable; the lives of many
working class blacks are correspondingly loosely
organised and prone to sudden changes with regards to
marital status, jobs and place of residence. This
contrasts with the typical Indian household, which is a
stabler social unit. In this respect, Trinidadian AIDS
figures must be regarded as relevant as an indication of
systematic differences in behaviour: they reveal that
Indians represented, in September, 1989, only 40 of a
total of 489 recorded Aids cases. It has also been
documented that "visiting relationships", that is, loose
sexual relationships, are statistically much less common
among Indians than among blacks (Roberts 1975, p. 163).
The power and powerlessness of creolised Indians
From the moment that the immigrant entered the
immigration depot in Calcutta, he was thrown
together with peoples of different castes, and
he found it impossible to follow caste
guidelines governing people of lower caste. On
board ship caste rules and regulations were
further weakened. On the plantation the
breakdown of caste as a principle of social
organisation was accelerated. (Brereton 1979,
p. 185)
The current interest in recreating and reviving Indian
traditions on Trinidadian soil (see LaGuerre 1974;
Dabydeen & Samaroo 1987; Vertovec 1990) has led to the
widespread awareness and articulation of issues that go
to the naked core of nationalism; namely, questions
concerning the content of nationalism and its
justification; why should the calypso be considered as
intrinsically more nationally Trinidadian than the
chutney (Indian popular music); who is a true-true Trini
and what are his discriminating qualities, and why should
this necessarily be so? Through raising these issues, the
Indian revitalisation movement has converted issues which
were formerly not on the political agenda to questions of
open critical discourse. This has not happened in
Mauritius, which has chosen a course of more consistent
cultural pluralism in its official national symbolism and
its development of national institutions. For example,
Mauritian schoolchildren are offered courses in a wide
variety of Asian languages, and Indian languages are
granted air time on national radio (Eriksen 1990b); this
would be unthinkable in Trinidad.
The form of the Indo-Trinidadian revitalisation movement
is typical. Half-forgotten rites have been revived;
pilgrimages to India are offered by travel agencies and
indeed, sometimes the exchange is mutual through the
import of Indian pundits; Indo-Trinidadian participants
in public discourse complain about discrimination. As the
Indo-Trinidadian John Gaffar LaGuerre puts it, somewhat
ironically:
The kurta and the pajama, the readings of the
Bhagavad Gita, the retreat into Islam or
Hinduism, the appeals for purity and the calls
for more holidays - these constitute the
euphoria of the movement. (LaGuerre 1974)
Yet, as is evident in the idiosyncratic identities of
young Indians, their Indianness is emphatically local in
character. As the educational and professional levels of
Indo-Trinidadians have improved, Indian ethnicity has
become more visible although its representatives are
evidently more strongly creolised than ever as regards
their actual representations and practices; the social
and cultural references of Indianness have, in other
words, changed.
Being creolised does not, it should be stressed,
necessarily imply losing one's Indianness; to think so
would be an essentialist error. Ethnically self-conscious
Indians in both societies, but particularly in Trinidad,
nevertheless see the foundations of their tradition
turning from stone to clay. As young Indians begin to
violate food taboos (they eat eggs and sometimes even
beefburgers), intermarriage becomes a very real
possibility and the source of profound worries in the
parental generation. Perhaps the generations of
Indo-Mauritians and Indo-Trinidadians reaching puberty at
the turn of the century will know nothing about holy
cows, or perhaps such knowledge will be purely
emblematic, with no profound bearing on their
life-worlds. This does not necessarily imply that
Indianness disappears as a form of social identity in
either of the societies, but that its content changes.
Thus, a focus on creolisation or adaptation need not be
incompatible with a focus on revitalisation. It is
theoretically conceivable, although I have argued that it
has not come about yet, that all systematic cultural
differences except the very notions of differences
between blacks and Indians will gradually disappear
through the culturally homogenising agencies of
nationalism and capitalism, and that the groups yet
remain distinctive to the extent of not intermarrying
systematically. This would imply what a leading
Trinidadian intellectual, Lloyd Best, has called cultural
douglarisation (Best, personal communication). The
dougla, in Trinidadian discourse, is a person with one
black and one Indian parent; the cultural dougla would
thus be a person whose identity encompasses aspects of
cultural Indianness as well as cultural blackness.
Some relevant differences between the societies
The similarities between the two societies should not be
exaggerated. Trinidad is locally perceived as a largely
black society (for better or for worse, as the case may
be), and unlike in Mauritius, several self-proclaimed
spokesmen for the Indians argue that they suffer cultural
domination. Policies acknowledging that Trinidad is truly
a poly-cultural society, and thus something different
from a modern cultural melting-pot, are conspicuously
absent. National cultural symbols include the calypso,
the carnival and the steelband, all of which are
associated with the blacks. The Indian presence is all
but ignored in national cultural life and in tourism
propaganda materials. The aforementioned beer commercial,
featuring an Indian classical singer, is so exceptional
that it may serve as a reminder of the paucity of Indian
cultural messages in the shared Trinidadian public space.
Most of the creolisation of Trinidadians of Indian origin
occurs without their being discursively aware of it
happening; in aesthetic taste, dress, body language and
the perceptions of relevant paths for professional or
matrimonial careers. This kind of process has also been
evident in Mauritius; for instance, the common form of
greeting is universally the handshake between Mauritian
men - this is not so in India. Nevertheless, the
Indo-Mauritians still seem to stand a better chance of
retaining important aspects of their cultural
distinctiveness, than do the Indo-Trinidadians. This is
due partly to their force in numbers, partly to their
firm position in the state agencies, partly to the
consciously poly-cultural policies of the nation-state,
and partly to their geographic proximity to India. All
this does not, however, necessarily matter as regards the
political importance of ethnicity.
Writing about the Trinidad of the turn of the century,
Bridget Brereton notes that
[t]here were those [press correspondents] who argued that
it was important to bring into the open the existence of
race feeling and discrimination, in order to destroy it;
they were nearly always coloured or black. (Brereton
1979, p. 199)
The Indo-Trinidadians were muted then; they may no longer
be politically silent, but unlike in Mauritius, they may
never be in a position sufficiently strong for them to
vie for cultural hegemony. The situation in the New
World, where Indianness is frowned upon in the national
context, encourages Trinidadians of Indian origin to
relinquish their cultural heritage and become thoroughly
creolised. Indo-Trinidadians featured on TV, radio, in
the press and other cultural contexts of national society
rarely display any of their Indian heritage. In other
words, Indians are accepted as long as they overtly
identify themselves with the majority; they are accepted
as Trinidadians but not as Indians. This form of cultural
hegemony presents many Indo-Trinidadians with a very real
predicament: If they strive to preserve their traditions,
some avenues of careering will be closed to them; and if
they wish to be successful say, in the media, then they
must relinquish their cultural identity and may be
regarded as traitors by the more militant members of
their community. Discontent following these lines,
widespread in Trinidad since Independence, has lead to a
certain exodus of Indians - some even tried to achieve
political refugee status in Canada in 1988 - but by and
large, the outcome will probably be an ever increasing
cultural creolisation of the dominated Indian population,
which may or may not influence the social importance of
ethnicity.
From a slightly different perspective, we may arrive at a
theoretically more interesting conclusion in this
comparative exercise. Although I have stressed the
differences, there are fundamental similarities,
culturally and socially, between the blacks of Trinidad
and Mauritius as well as between the Indians of Trinidad
and Mauritius. In many respects, the similarities are
more striking than the differences, and they include
important aspects of social organisation and cultural
values. Yet, the respective structural positions of these
four categories of people in their national societies are
different from what one might be inclined to expect. It
is true that in both societies, Indians are more
successful petty capitalists than are blacks, and it is
also true that more blacks and coloureds than Indians
work in the media. But if we look at national politics,
and more importantly, at the monitoring of public
discourse through the legal system, through mass media,
the forging of international links and through various
state cultural policies, it appears that the r⌠le of
Indians in Mauritius is the opposite of that in Trinidad,
and by the same token, the respective roles of blacks in
the two societies are opposite. Indeed, the culturally
defensive position of Trinidadian Indians, possessing
many of the characteristics of minority groups, is
similar to the position of blacks in Mauritius. Recall
now the example of the governmental smallplanter support
scheme in Mauritius and the negative reactions of the
non-Indian population. A similar government policy in
Trinidad in 1989 led to remarkably similar reactions from
the Indians: the policy intended to support small
businessmen, and Indians claimed that it was tailored to
suit the interests of urban blacks. This similarity in
collective reactions to governmental policies has
something to do with statistical majority-minority
relationships, but it is also intrinsically connected
with the wider international contexts in which the two
societies are set; Trinidad being, geographically and
historically, a part of the New World, while Mauritius
has always been located en route from Europe to India. In
Mauritius, blacks are rarely accused of being
communalists (ethnicist); this could be interpreted as an
indication of their lack of leadership, or their lack of
political power, or both. In Trinidad, blacks are often
accused of "racism"; it is frequently alleged, by
non-blacks, that the PNM took over an important principle
of recruitment to high bureaucratic positions from the
British, namely that of "providing jobs for the boys".
This crucial difference between the two societies shows
the importance of distinguishing between what we may call
the cultural and political contexts of ethnicity. At the
level of social classification and ethnic stereotyping,
Trinidad and Mauritius are very similar. At the level of
ethnic politics, they are very different; both in the
sense that the Indians have a variable relationship to
the state, and in the sense that state policies tend to
discourage, or at least ignore, cultural plurality in
Trinidad. It is not too bold to conclude, therefore, that
the potential for serious ethnic conflict involving
discontented Indians is presently higher in Trinidad than
in Mauritius.
Notes
1For sociological and historical descriptions of the
societies, see Braithwaite (1975); Brereton (1979, 1981);
Oxaal (1968); Ryan (1972) for Trinidad; see Bowman
(1990); Arno & Orian (1986); Eriksen (1990a); Allen
(1983) for Mauritius.
2The notion of the "Indian diaspora" is in itself a
controversial one. In defining themselves as diaspora
Indians, some Indo-Trinidadian activists have implicitly
defined themselves as something different from
Trinidadians, namely as Indians, and have been criticised
by Trinidadian nationalists for this.
3There is some academic discussion regarding whether
phenotypical ("racial") differences are likely lead to a
more "profound" kind of ethnicity or more systematic
ethnic discrimination than other differences, and whether
race should be distinguished analytically from ethnicity.
This topic falls outside of the scope of this paper,
where I do not distinguish between race and ethnicity;
see the discussion in Rex and Mason (1986).
4In other areas, such as East Africa and Britain, large
proportions of Indian tradesmen are of Gujerati origins.
See Allen (1983) for an analysis of Mauritius during
indentureship; see Weller (1968) for an account of
indentureship in Trinidad.
5 In several other countries which received Indian
minorities during colonial rule, such as Kenya, Tanzania,
Malaysia and South Africa, do these minorities wield
considerable economic power.
6This does not mean that culturally self-conscious Indian
movements are non-existent in Mauritius, but that their
proponents have little impact on public discourse. At the
main Mauritian academic research institution, the Mahatma
Gandhi Institute, one will encounter a larger proportion
of young women in saris than virtually anywhere else in
Mauritius.
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Abstract
There are many intriguing similarities and differences
between the Creole island societies of the western Indian
Ocean and Caribbean island societies. This paper focuses
on the ethnic situation of the Indian "diaspora" of
Mauritius and Trinidad, as well as their relationship to
nation-building in the two poly-ethnic societies. While
the differences in political power are seen as
significant in the comparison of the two island
democracies, there are also important similarities
between the two uprooted groups. Several factors
accounting for differences and similarities are
discussed, and finally, it is argued that the potential
for profound ethnic conflict is at present higher in
Trinidad than in Mauritius.
⌐Thomas Hylland Eriksen 1992
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Nexus