Representations of Indentureship in Indo-Caribbean Literature from 1960 to the Present
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ABSTRACT Title of Document: UNHOMELY STIRRINGS: REPRESENTATIONS OF INDENTURESHIP IN INDO-CARIBBEAN LITERATURE FROM 1960 TO THE PRESENT Anita Baksh, Doctor of Philosophy, 2014 Directed By: Professor Merle Collins, Department of English This dissertation investigates the ways in which East Indian Caribbean (Indo- Caribbean) writers negotiate history, identity, and belonging. Nineteenth-century government officials and plantation owners described Indian indentureship (1838- 1917) in the British West Indies as a contractual system of employment implemented after abolition and as a civilizing mechanism aimed at reforming heathen laborers. Challenging these accounts, historians have shown that the system was a new mode of exploitation. Colonial administrators used coercive tactics to control workers and implemented strategic laws to confine Indians to the plantation. These policies constructed Indians as foreigners and interlopers in colonial society, perceptions that have significantly impacted the formation of Indo-Caribbean subjectivities and Indo- Caribbean claims to postcolonial citizenship in the region. Reading both canonical and lesser known texts, my project argues that Indo-Caribbean writers frequently engage with indentureship as a means to come to terms with this history of oppression and as a way to contest their elision in Anglophone Caribbean culture more widely. Drawing on postcolonial theory, I examine works published from 1960 to the present by authors from Guyana and Trinidad, countries where Indians constitute a significant portion of the population. My analysis begins in the 1960s because it was at this time that literary and political debates began to focus on decolonization and on defining a culture distinct from Britain. Given that Indian indentures were unable to record their own experiences, their perspectives are largely omitted from the Caribbean historiography. Moreover, as Indians moved off the plantation and gained socio-economic mobility, they often viewed indenture as a shameful part of their heritage that was best forgotten. By examining V.S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas, Peter Kempadoo’s Guyana Boy, Harold Ladoo’s No Pain Like This Body, Ramabai Espinet’s The Swinging Bridge, the novels of Shani Mootoo, and the poetry of Rajkumari Singh, Rooplall Monar, and Mahadai Das, “Unhomely Stirrings” traces the processes by which indenture has been subjected to willful acts of forgetting within Indo-Caribbean communities and in larger national histories. These texts engage the ways in which the legacy of indentureship continues to shape the contemporary lives and identities of Indo-Caribbean people at home and in the diaspora. UNHOMELY STIRRINGS: REPRESENTATIONS OF INDENTURESHIP IN INDO-CARIBBEAN LITERATURE FROM 1960 TO THE PRESENT By Anita Baksh Your Full Name as it appears in University Records. Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Maryland, College Park, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2014 Advisory Committee: Professor Merle Collins, Chair Associate Professor Michelle Rowley Associate Professor Edlie Wong Associate Professor Zita Nunes Associate Professor Cordell Black © Copyright by Anita Baksh 2014 Acknowledgements I am grateful to my director, Dr. Merle Collins, for her careful reading, kindness, and mentorship. I thank the members of my committee, Drs. Michelle Rowley, Zita Nunes, Edlie Wong, and Cordell Black, for generously reading my work and for offering support in various ways throughout my graduate career. Their enthusiasm and encouragement have been invaluable. I am thankful for the graduate fellowships and travel grants from the University of Maryland that have provided me with the time and support needed for research and travel. For their friendship and intellectual engagement, I thank Drs. Rewa Burnham, Isis Semaj, Lisa Outar, and Autumn Womack. The faculty at St. John’s University has provided much professional support. I am particularly indebted to Drs. John Lowney and Dohra Ahmad for their advice and generosity. Without the long-lasting friendship and devotion of Lakisha Odlum, I would not have been able to overcome the bumps in this journey. My family –my aunts, uncles, cousins and in-laws- have always offered much encouragement. My mother and sister have been my most dedicated and loud cheerleaders; always confident in and proud of my abilities. I am grateful to Sanjiv Ramesar for his relentless support and love, and to Ravi, for grounding me and reminding me of the larger importance of this project. Finally, I dedicate this dissertation to my late grandparents -Pooran Misir and Sumintra Mangru- whose lessons of hard work and love reverberate throughout this work. ii Table of Contents Acknowledgements ....................................................................................................... ii Chapter 1: Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 Chapter 2: An Unhomely Stirring: Indentureship, Trauma, and Memory in V. S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas ............................................................................. 23 Chapter 3: Reconsidering the Folk in Peter Kempadoo’s Guyana Boy and Harold Ladoo’s No Pain Like This Body ................................................................................ 62 Chapter 4: “Days of the Sahib Are Over:” Nationalist Thoughts and Socialist Politics in Indo-Guyanese Poetry........................................................................................... 111 Chapter 5: An Archive of Silence: Indenture, Memory, and Gender in Ramabai Espinet’s The Swinging Bridge ................................................................................. 166 Chapter 6: “Beyond the Kala Pani: Affect, Sexuality and Indentureship in the Novels of Shani Mootoo” ...................................................................................................... 196 Conclusion: ............................................................................................................... 235 Bibliography ............................................................................................................. 238 iii Chapter 1: Introduction When I was a little boy growing up in San Fernando, there was a dark old Indian named Sammy who came around to our street selling fish. He was partly paralyzed and walked with a limp [...] we teased and jeered at him whenever he came. One day he turned up with a white man toting the fish for him: I learnt afterwards that he was an escaped convict from Devil’s Island whom Sammy had come across on the beach and took in hand to be his assistant. I was furious with the old man for putting the white man in such a humiliating position. My heart went out in a wave of sympathy and dismay for him in a way it never did for the poor crippled Indian struggling to earn an honest living. ---Samuel Selvon 1979 Despite being the son of a mixed Scottish and Indian mother and Madrassi Indian father, as a child, Samuel Selvon viewed Indians as backward, poor peasants; images that starkly contrasted to the mixture of races and American cinema that was part of his everyday reality in “cosmopolitan” San Fernando. In his keynote address at the second East Indians in the Caribbean Conference in 1979, Selvon spoke of his early perceptions of East Indians in Trinidad: To me, the Indian was relegated to the countryside. When I went to spend the holidays in Princes Town or Gasparillo, I saw workers in the canefields, or that sold nuts along the roadside and brown children bathing under the stand pipe, or else there was the occasional ‘country bookie’ who came to town, or the vendors and the beggars who migrated to the pavement in the high street” (“Three” 15). For Selvon, his lack of knowledge of his Indian background stemmed from his experience growing up “Trinidadian”: “I was one of the boys, doing jump-up at Carnival time, giving and taking picong [….] eating a late night roti down St. James” (15). Thus, “Indian” and “Trinidadian” were antithetical, an idea reflected most aptly in the title of Selvon’s talk, “Three Into One Can’t Go –East Indian, Trinidadian, Westindian.” What is 1 most interesting about Selvon’s recounting of these memories – such as those I present in the above epigraph – is that while he recognizes that his early perceptions about race in Trinidad were linked to colonial hierarchies, he fails to articulate how his early view of Indians specifically reflect derogatory stereotypes of this group that derive from indentureship; stereotypes that had been ingrained into his consciousness. Selvon’s speech raises important questions about the place of indentureship in dominant constructions of communal, regional, and world history. “Unhomely Stirrings” investigates the ways in which East Indian Caribbean (Indo-Caribbean) writers negotiate history, identity, and belonging. In the nineteenth- century, government officials and plantation owners described Indian indentureship (1838-1917) as a contractual system of employment. After the abolition of slavery in the British West Indies, indentured Indians voluntarily committed to work in the British plantation colonies in the New World for a set period of time and for a set wage. Additionally, colonial discourse presented the system as a civilizing mechanism aimed at reforming heathen laborers. Challenging these accounts, historians such as Walter Rodney and Mahadavi Kale have shown