Like many other small towns in Trinidad, Felicity is populated almost entirely by East Indians. In their Caribbean exile, the residents of Felicity have created and recreated the music of their Hindu ancestors. Music of Hindu Trinidad is a fascinating account of the history and cultural significance of Hindu music that explores its symbolic, aesthetic, and psychological aspects while asking the larger question of how this music has contributed to the formation of identity in the midst of their great diaspora. Myers details the musical repertory of Felicity, which is based largely on north Indian genres including the traditional Bhojpuri folk songs and drumming styles brought by the first indentured laborers in 1845. In her engaging exploration of the fate of Indian classical music and new popular styles such as Hindi calypso, soca, and chutney, she even finds herself at the ancestral home of Trinidadian V. S. Naipaul in India. Copiously illustrated and accompanied by a compact disk, Music of Hindu Trinidad is a model ethnographic study.

Includes texts of 202 songs in Bhojpuri (Devanagari) and English translation.

An innovative analysis of how ideas of Indian identity negotiated within the Indian diaspora in Trinidad affect cultural identities "back home" in India.

Trinidadian sitarist, composer, and music authority, Mangal Patasar once remarked about tãn-singing, "You take a capsule from India, leave it here for a hundred years, and this is what you get." Patasar was referring to what may be the most sophisticated and distinctive art form cultivated among the one and a half million East Indians whose ancestors migrated as indentured laborers from colonial India to the West Indies between 1845 and 1917. Known in Trinidad and Guyana as "tãn-singing" or "local-classical music" and in Suriname as "baithak gãna" ("sitting music"), tãn-singing has evolved into a unique idiom, embodying the rich poetic and musical heritage brought from India as modified by a diaspora group largely cut off from its ancestral homeland. In recent decades, however, tãn-singing has been declining, regarded as quaint and crude by younger generations raised on MTV, Hindi film music, and disco. At the same time, Indo-Caribbeans have been participating in their countries' economic, political, and cultural lives to a far greater extent than previously. Accompanying this participation has been a lively cultural revival, encompassing both an enhanced assertion of Indianness and a spirit of innovative syncretism. One of the most well-known products of this process is chutney, a dynamic music and dance phenomenon that is simultaneously a folk revival and a pop hybrid. In Trinidad, it has also been the vehicle for a controversial form of female empowerment and an agent of a new, more inclusive, conception of national identity. Thus, East Indian Music in the West Indies is a portrait of a diaspora community in motion. It documents the social and cultural development of a people "without history," a people who have sometimes been dismissed as foreigners who merely perpetuate the culture of the homeland rather than becoming "truly" Caribbean. Professor Manuel shows how inaccurate this characterization is. On the one hand, in the form of tãn-singing, it examines the distinctiveness of traditional Indo-Caribbean musical culture. On the other, in the form of chutney, it examines the new assertiveness and syncretism of Indo-Caribbean popular music. Students of Indo-Caribbean music and curious world-music fans alike will be fascinated by Professor Manuel's guided tour through the complex and exciting world of Indo-Caribbean musical culture. Author note: Peter Manuel, an authority on the music of both North India and the Caribbean, is Associate Professor in the Department of Art, Music, and Philosophy at John Jay College. He is the author of several books, including Popular Musics of the Non-Western World (Oxford University Press), Cassette Culture: Popular Music and Technology in North India, and Caribbean Currents: Caribbean Music from Rumba to Reggae (Temple University Press).

Introduction: an overview of Indian Diaspora in the Caribbean / Kumar Mahabir -- 1. Involuntary globalization: how Britain revived indenture and made it largely brown and East Indian (Trinidad 1806-1921) / A. Neil SookDeo -- 2. From Hindu to Presbyndu: the acculturation of the Indian in the Caribbean / Brinsley Samaroo -- 3. Migration and shifting (communal) identifications: Munshi Rahman Khan (1874-1972) / Ellen Bal & Kathinka Sinha-Kerkhoff -- 4. Indo-Guyanese diaspora within the Caribbean: migration and identity / Lomarsh Roopnarine -- 5. Race retention and culture loss: South Asians / East Indians in St. Vincent / Kumar Mahabir -- 6. Values and beliefs of Indo-Guyanese: an assessment of the assimilation hypothesis / Preethy S. Samuel and Leon C. Wilson -- 7. "I found my East Indian beauty..." : locating the Indo Trinidadian woman in Trinidadian Soca music / Kai Abi Barratt -- 8. Racial stereotypes and Indian-African relations in Grenada, 1857-1960s / Ron Sookram -- 9. The impossibility of resistance: 1970s Guyana in Oonya Kempadoo's Buxton spice / Savena Budhu -- 10. Kala Pani coolitude? East Indian subjectivity in the Caribbean / Smita Tripathi -- 11. Mothers-hyphenated imaginations: the feasts of Soparee Ke Mai and La Divina Pastora in Trinidad / Teruyuki Tsuji -- 12. The representation of Indians in the education system of Trinidad and Tobago, 1845-1980 / Sherry-Ann Singh -- 13. Balram Singh Rai: Guyana's Indian social and political reformer / Baytoram Ramharack.

Dance, Music and Cultures of Decolonisation in the Indian Diaspora provides fascinating examples of dance and music projects across the Indian Diaspora to highlight that decolonisation is a creative process, as well as a historical and political one. The book analyses creative processes in decolonising projects, illustrating how dance and music across the Indian Diaspora articulate socio-political aspirations in the wake of thinkers such as Gandhi and Ambedkar. It presents a wide range of examples: post-apartheid practices and experiences in a South African dance company, contestations over national identity politics in Trinidadian music competitions, essentialist and assimilationist strategies in a British dance competition, the new musical creativity of second-generation British-Tamil performers, Indian classical dance projects of reform and British multiculturalism, feminist intercultural performances in Australia, and performance re-enactments of museum exhibits that critically examine the past. Key topics under discussion include postcolonial contestations, decolonising scholarship, dialogic pedagogies and intellectual responsibility. The book critically reflects on decolonising aims around respect, equality and the colonial past’s redress as expressed through performing arts projects. Presenting richly detailed case studies that underline the need to examine creative processes in the cultures of decolonisation, Dance, Music and Cultures of Decolonisation in the Indian Diaspora will be of great interest to scholars of South Asian Studies, Diaspora Studies, Performing Arts Studies and Anthropology. The chapters were originally published as a special issue of South Asian Diaspora.

Characterized by fast-paced, highly danceable rhythms, chutney is a fusion of traditional and contemporary Indian and Caribbean influences. In this volume Tina K. Ramnarine explores the evolution of chutney and introduces the emerging Indian-Caribbean genre into the area of scholarly discourse. Through analysis of the music, Ramnarine provides insights into social processes, effects of the diasporic settlements and ways the music operates as a symbol of Indian-Caribbean identity. This introduction of new cultural elements is a common occurrence among people transplanted to an unfamiliar geographical and cultural environment.