Nation, Diaspora, Trans-nation

Reflections from India

Ravindra K. Jain

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781136704130
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

A premier debate in the present conjuncture of globalization has been the prospect of 'post nation' and the obsolescence of patriotism at the horizon of transnationalism. In an ethnographically rich and discursively sharp intervention R. K. Jain articulates the contribution that diaspora studies can make to this debate.

In this anthropological narrative both nation and trans-nation are 'moving targets'; their positionality shifts and changes according to the geo-political location of the analyst and the frame of comparison brought to bear on the objects/subjects of study. In Jain's case the locus happens to be India but the discussion in this book does not foreclose perspectives from 'other' nations. Indeed as his own examples from countries of the Indian Ocean zone, the Asia Pacific region and the Caribbean amply demonstrate the methodology of ethno-cultural relativism built in these diasporic comparisons is the surest guarantee for tracing the juxtaposed dialectic of nation and trans-nation from whichever existential location one begins.

The rootedness of this particular discourse in India provides coherence in the nature of a case-study of globalization from a prominent diaspora node of our times. At the same time it unravels dimensions of Indian social institutions viewed from the vantage point of diaspora. The book, therefore, is an invitation to further multi-disciplinary and multi-sited collaboration in the exploration of globalization, diaspora, nationalism and patriotism as well as transnationalism from diverse perspectives.

Chapter One

Reflexivity and the Diaspora: Indian Women in Post-indenture Caribbean, Fiji, South Africa, and Mauritius

In one of my recent writings on the Indian diaspora I have said:

Beyond history, geography and government policy in relation to motherland or fatherland societies on the one side and host countries, on the other, in comparative analytical terms the diaspora as a third space may also be constructed in terms of three parameters or contexts: the personal trajectory of the analyst, the national location or locations of the populations involved and the international setting which has affected the nature of diaspora throughout contemporary history. This is close to the reflexivity view. (R. K. Jain 2008: 154–55)

Here I wish to distance myself heuristically from the “objectifying reflexivity” contained in the latter two contexts — the national and international scenarios of discourse on diaspora — and focus instead on the “culturally subjective reflexivity” (although in a deeper sense, as we shall see, there is no dichotomy between the two forms of reflexivity). As such, the reflexivity that I am going to explore, initially besides my personal trajectory, is that of the diaspora-based “Indian” scholars and the non-Indian “others” who have broached the interpretation of diaspora. This is as a methodological prolegomena for the discussion of Indian women’s agency in post-indenture Caribbean, Fiji, South Africa, and Mauritius. I have chosen these localities because they represent the “old” diaspora or the PIOs.

Variations in Reflexivity

To begin with my personal trajectory, the understanding of diaspora institutions and networks explored by me for nearly the last 45 years seems to be grounded in my school-boy fascination for Arnold J. Toynbee’s (1946) theory of the rise and fall of civilizations in terms of challenge and response. Later on, in the study of Indian communities abroad, one was interested initially in the processes and results of various categories of Indian population adapting to situations abroad which were multi-ethnic and multi-racial. As a student I was also interested in anthropological comparisons as cultural translation, viz., not only the socio-cultural adaptations abroad but the light that these “experiments in nature” — Indian communities abroad — shed on Indian social institutions themselves. To give only two examples, the way in which Hinduism and the caste system could be disjointed (contra Srinivas 1962: 70–76) and the manner in which “collapsing space” (Haraksingh 1988: 116) forged in the diaspora regional and religious differences and heterogeneity into a novel kaleidoscopic pattern. The other curiosity satisfied for me by globetrotting in the Indian diaspora was this: to demolish the facile distinction which some sociologists in my university (Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi) and elsewhere in India made between the sociological “bird’s eye view” and the social anthropological “worm’s eye view” — the latter in their estimation fit only for “tribal studies”! With due modesty, let me state that comparative, analytical and theory-based anthropological studies of the Indian diaspora require a “jet’s eye view”.¹

Perhaps the best examples of diaspora-based Indian scholars are authors like Brij V. Lal and Vijay Mishra (Fiji), Kusha Haraksingh, Brinsley Samaroo and Patricia Mohammed (Trinidad and Tobago), the Gayan sisters — Surya and A. Devi — and Vinesh Hookoomsing (Mauritius) and Surendra Bhana and Anand Singh (South Africa). The list could be much longer if I did not confine myself to the PIOs who have written about the four locations discussed here and included NRIs as well. Contrasted with a lot of non-Indian scholars (cf. Tinker 1974 as the leading light), there is in this category of authors a certain common denominator of reflexivity. In a broad sense, they subscribe to the “challenge and response” paradigm that I mentioned earlier. Sample, for instance, the point-of-view of Brij V. Lal who is originally an Indo-Fijian academic, grandchild of an indentured laborer from eastern Uttar Pradesh, presently a senior academic at the Australian National University, Canberra. According to Lal (2005) the indenture experience among overseas Indians may have been one of suffering and privation at one level but at the same time it provided an opportunity and a challenge to thwart adversity with a mixture of adventure and fortitude. Similarly, quite a number of scholars in this category have deeply internalized the syntagm of the Ramayana and other religious texts which their forefathers brought from India to the extent that lord Rama’s banishment from Ayodhya for 14 years provides a powerful metaphor for their own exile from the motherland (Mishra 1979). Furthermore, the ethical message of the Ramayana as religious and moral succor in adversity is a constant refrain both in their ideology and practice. Another “emic”, internalized, bias here is the absence of a dichotomy (which objective “etic” analysis seems to uphold) between cultural persistence and “creolization” in the host societies. As Kusha Haraksingh succinctly puts it for Trinidad and Tobago, adjustment was a crucial part of the process of cultural reproduction and reconstruction, since “nothing could have lasted so long unless it was responsive to change” (1998: 118). The case for the coexistence of cultural persistence and creolization in the Trinidadian Indian community has been eloquently made by Viranjini Munasinghe (2001).

The third category, viz., non-Indian scholars of the Indian diaspora began their writings in the 1950s and a good representative example is a special issue of the British Journal of Sociology (1957) on “Factions in Indian and Overseas Indian Communities”, edited by the doyen of British anthropologists of those times, Raymond Firth. The essays in that volume deal with the then transformation of colonially subjected “Indian” societies to newly-found independence and one can discern in these analyses the anxious concern of ex-colonials to figure out how political processes will shape up in societies without a deep rooting in parliamentary and other forms of constitutional democracy. This British angst echoes the parallel concerns of contemporary American analysts in books like Old Societies and New States (1963) edited by Clifford Geertz. It is my contention that this category of authors put the searchlight either on the shallow roots of democracy in the new nations or went further and (in a mood of breast-beating as it were) highlighted the adverse consequences of Western colonialism in the new nations, including those which contained a substantial population of overseas Indians. This is a methodological strand that continues from the immediate post-War writings of J.H. Furnivall (1948) and, ironically enough, persists unabated, though suitably updated, in writings like those of John D. Kelly (1991) for Fiji, Keith O. Laurence (1994) for Trinidad and Tobago or Hugh Tinker for the indentured Indian diaspora as a whole. In contrast to the upbeat and positive thrust of the second category of the Indian diaspora authors that I mentioned above, the streak of reflexivity in this genre is characterized by nervousness, guilt and an aura of negativity.

Reflexivity and Diasporic Indian Women’s Agency

I have so far commented very briefly on the nature of reflexivity in the analyses of anthropological and other social scientific writings on the Indian diaspora. However, this is hardly an adequate summation of what the reflexive movement (cf. Herzfeld 2001b) in social anthropology, particularly in ethnographic fieldwork, entails. And it is clearly related to the kind of comparisons we make. To quote Micahel Herzfeld (ibid.: 260–61) in some detail:

Comparison is reflexive in so far as it recognizes that it always proceeds from the experience (Greek empeiria) of the fieldworking self. As one begins the daily round of fieldwork, questions inevitably arise from a sense of the difference between this field encounter and either previous research situations or the ethnographer’s own familiar cultural context…what makes any fact stand out is this sense of contrast. And not infrequently it is the local informants who draw out that sense of contrast, by making the ethnographer self-conscious with the questioning of so much that the ethnographer takes for granted: why do you still have no children? Why do you spend so much time writing? Why are you unwilling to eat this food? Why do you wash your clothes in a visible place? As the ethnographer in town begins to reflect more analytically on the cultural differences thus highlighted, informant and ethnographer alike become signs of both the differences and the contrasts through which they become meaningful to each other….Knowledge of human affairs, as Vico (1744) taught, depends on the frail, embodied capacities of human selves. Comparison only works when it is sensitive to its own context of production: it must be reflexively reflexive.

As it will become clearer in what follows, anthropologists of the diaspora do not yet possess a body of data based on reflexive ethnography of the kind recommended by Herzfeld. In any case, when one is dealing with secondary and even primary historical archives, the data does not speak back to you as can happen in anthropological fieldwork. Yet if we analyze our archives as textual material open to symbolic interpretations — both paradigmatic and syntagmatic — at least a salutary, surrogate reflexivity may be attained. The rest of my chapter partakes of such endeavor, where I try to substitute formal comparison by the linkage between comparison and reflexivity in regard to diasporic Indian women that appears increasingly central to an empirical (rather than “empiricist”) understanding of social and cultural phenomena.

Before I record instances of reflexivity in the empirical depiction of post-indenture women in four diaspora settings, a brief mention of the recent social sciences’ emphasis on actors’ agency seems in order (Giddens 1979: 97, 112, 256–57; 1984: 3–14, 281–85, 289). The analyst needs to locate complex understandings of women’s agency within their productive and reproductive roles, within and through structural constraints and in the construction of “culture”. Thus problematized, our project takes a step towards being genuinely comparative in that the four moments of post-indenture Indian women are provided a framework where these instances can “speak” to each other. Agency is another name for the reflexive monitoring of action. There are enough similarities in our subjects’ (indentured and post-indenture women) agency to attempt a comparative analysis. At the same time, of course, there are divergences in the analysts’ perceptions as to the intended and unintended consequences of this agency. We shall encounter these convergences and divergences in what follows.

The Caribbean, Mainly Trinidad and Tobago

Certain attempts to characterize “East Indian Women” in the Caribbean appear seriously flawed. For instance, Jeremy Poynting (1987: 231–64) starts the depiction of East Indian women’s status in nineteenth-century Trinidad with the usual appeal to their scarcity, that throughout the period of indenture (1838–1917) the ratio of female to male immigrants always lagged well behind the ratio of 2:5 recommended by the immigration ordinances. He is aware that paradoxical arguments have been made about Indian women in the Caribbean being more free and less free as a consequence of their scarcity; however, citing certain colonial authorities like the missionary, H. V. P. Bronkhurst in British Guiana, Poynting plumps for female independence during indenture though at the same time “Indian women paid a heavy price in beatings and in loss of life at the hands of men” (ibid.: 233). Interestingly enough, the same author subscribes to the view that “towards the end of the indenture period the precarious independence of Indian women began to be curtailed” (ibid.: 236–37). He cites the evidence of statistics collected under colonial auspices to establish the frequency of an unbalanced sex ratio, wife murders and proportions of Indian population living in estate camps and in villages. However, the moot point is whether “this process (the move from estate camps to settled villages) permitted a partial reconstitution of the traditional North Indian village culture” (ibid.: 234–35) where women were withdrawn from estate wage-labor to unpaid labor on the lands which Indians began acquiring, child marriage became the norm, and the wives of some of the high-caste men were returned to a state of domestic seclusion “as fitting their husbands’ status” (ibid.: 234). These are extrapolations from stray observations of colonial authors, government officials and missionaries, with their hidden biases, making their use as source material intractably difficult (cf. R. K. Jain 1986b: 316). Of special relevance here are the criteria by which women’s freedom or servitude is being judged and the precise nature of the grid of “tradition” which is being introduced from the outside as it were, in the argument. And yet, without any further discussion of these contentious characterizations, Poynting immediately jumps to further statistics concerning low levels of literacy, education and professional jobs among Indian women in the Caribbean. All this is grist to the mill of Poynting’s conclusion that this outline of East Indian women’s “backwardness” in experience serves to show why it has taken so long for any Indo-Caribbean women’s voice to emerge. And when it comes to a discussion of the “voice”, our author confines himself to the few contemporary East Indian women poets writing English verse. Lamentably, he mixes up judgements on the literary quality of the poetry with the message that they contain.

A much more persuasive track is adopted by those authors who base themselves literally on the recorded voices of indentured and post-indenture women in the Caribbean. Patricia Mohammed (1994) has pursued the subject of her doctoral dissertation, a study of community and gender politics in the Indo-Trinidadian community in the post-indenture period, with a number of articles based on interviews with Maharani and her daughter Mrs. Mahadaya Ramsewak.² The same lady, Maharani, was interviewed by Noor Kumar Mahabir (1985). These interviews were recorded in creole (i.e., African) English and interspersed with words from Indian languages like Bhojpuri and Hindi. Mahabir, who recorded the episodes of indentured laborers’ arrival and settlement in Trinidad in his book The Still Cry, did little to alter the text and thus retained the authentic voices of his East Indian forebears and allowed them to speak for themselves for the first time. No one speaks for them. The text presents not only what transpired in the journey and settlement but also their attempts to control language, to mash it up and break it up to fit the exigencies of their new situation. Today, more than 80 years since the last East Indians made their journey to Trinidad one can still discern the struggle to articulate a reality that is at once strange and distant and yet which must be grasped, controlled and explicated.

Sumitra Chatterjee (2001: 206–23) has utilized this archive to interpret “a gendered dialogue amongst Indo-Trinidadians, 1845–1917”. Her analysis is based on official and non-official sources such as memoirs, newspapers, one female-authored biography, and oral interviews with Indian men and women. In her view historical scholarship studying aspects of community and identity-formation has tended to look at arenas of public-sphere activities, overlooking or simply ignoring the vitality of the domestic sphere which plays an important role in reinventing an imagined space, particularly in exile and resettlement. In highlighting the role women played in recreating a cultural dynamic in the domestic sphere — drawing and articulating remembered customs and rituals from their natal homes — it should also be stressed that this was not their sole signifier. They were not secluded in the domestic sphere in the period under study, but worked alongside fellow male workers on plantations and in peasant subsistence and surplus production. The majority of women were breadwinners as well as homemakers. Even the remembered rituals by women are to be studied not to outline how pure and originary they were but how they were articulated in nascent efforts to build a communitarian space in the new homeland. For example, the presence of Indian women created the most significant basis for the workers’ ability to form families, set up nascent boundaries of social interactions and extended kinship networks and generally “recreate their ethnic hearths” (Mintz 1987: 54–55).

Oral testimonies such as those of Maharani, who came to Trinidad on an indentured contract in 1916, and the valuable autobiography (My Mother’s Daughter, 1992) of Anna Mahase (Sr.), born in 1899 in Trinidad of Indian parents, give an intimate account of the background and role of early East Indian women. Whereas in the early colonial public sphere and public discourse Indian women who had traveled on independent contracts of work were often typecast as “immoral, streetwise prostitutes”, the oral sources paint a very different picture. In these sources one sees contrary identities emerge — women as breadwinners, storytellers, singers, dancers, peasant proprietors, workers, milk sellers, grass cutters, writers, and worshippers. Oral communication remained the most powerful vehicle through which many remembered and imagined rituals, social and sexual habits as well as languages (Bhojpuri and Tamil) continued to be transferred for at least the next three generations of settlers. Interestingly enough, women were also the more stubborn settlers in Trinidad rather than male returnees to their Indian villages. The reason was, as S. Chatterjee (2001: 210) puts it,

just as pollution and caste impurities of travel played an inhibitive role in the workers’ ability to relocate or “belong” once again in their natal home, so too the prescriptive gender ideologies operating in India made the female worker’s return doubly problematic. In this context then, in the early period of uncertain settlement, female presence, female voices and the power dynamics of gender played a very critical role in shaping the spiritual and material ethos of an incipient home in an alien regime.

Madhaye Ramsewak, daughter of 102-year old Maharani at the time of the taping, speaking on behalf of her mother, said,

I can remember when I was small, anywhere she going I had to go too, if she going Hosay and t’ing right, where they sing Massiah and t’ing.. From small I remember Massiah and t’ing.. Massiah is the hosay song — when the hosay coming out the ladies an’ them sing and they will play tassa…when ladies had babies and t’ing, they singing for twelve days. Every night you are going and singing sohar….they do chhatti and barahi (when they do six and twelve days)....I knew plenty from she, because I go with she.

She explains at great length the significance of the songs of sohar, associated with birth, as well as lava (parched grain) and maaticore (clay drawings on wall) songs and customs performed during elaborate weddings that stretched over three nights. Contrary to Poynting’s interpretation that exclusively feminine rituals of maaticore, with obscene and bawdy singing and dancing, were expressions of repressed sexuality of women, I would agree with S. Chatterjee (2001: 213–14) that “It was in this exclusively female world, largely undocumented by official and missionary scribes that women in all probability experienced the greatest degree of enjoyment and empowerm...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• Introduction: A World on the Move
• Chapter One: Reflexivity and the Diaspora: Indian Women in Post-Indenture Caribbean, Fiji, Mauritius, and South Africa
• Chapter Two: Race Relations, Ethnicity, Class and Culture: Indians in Trinidad and Malaysia
• Chapter Three: From Product to Process: Sikh Diaspora in Southeast Asia
• Chapter Four: Indian Diasporic Integration in South Africa
• Chapter Five: Indians in Australia: Culture, Economy and Ecology
• Chapter Six: Home and Abroad in the New Millennium
• Chapter Seven: The Indian Diaspora and its Governance
• Chapter Eight: Indian Modernity and the Diaspora, a Civilizational Discourse
• Conclusion: Diaspora, Trans-nation and Nation
• Bibliography
• About the Author
• Index