Diaspora in Trinidad

Between 1838, after the end of slavery, and 1920, over half a million Indians were transported by the British to the Caribbean, including to British, French, and Dutch West Indian colonies, and signed on as indentured laborers. From 1845 to 1917, roughly 144,000 of those arrived in the British colony of Trinidad. Laborers were recruited from various parts of colonial India (many coming from the northeast), so that those who arrived reflected the diversity of communities and practices in the subcontinent. This gradually led to the generalization and consolidation of practices, the eliding of differences, and the impracticability and drastic transformation of caste hierarchies and identities. Hinduism was not something transported whole cloth from India to Trinidad. Initially, Indian Trinidadians had to make new lives for themselves within the constraints of the majority Catholic Afro-Trinidadian colony under the rule of British Anglican and French Catholic colonial officials and plantation owners. They did so using whatever cultural forms were available. These included authoritative colonial categories, grassroots ritual and healing traditions (such as popular Catholic practice and “obeah,” identified as Afro-Caribbean healing and spirit working), and fragments of rituals, myths, and sectarian identities brought in peoples’ memories from India. In the 19th and early 20th century, the practices of people identified as Hindu (or at least those practices most obvious to colonial observers from whom we have accounts) were not those typically associated with Hinduism today. They involved, for instance, the formation of temporary ritual communities united in the commemorating and celebrating of the life and martyrdom of Imam Husayn during Hosay (or Muharram), in making offerings to a dark skinned, southern Trinidadian Virgin Mary identified as a goddess, or in walking on hot coals as part of devotion to fierce goddesses and their consorts for Firepass. Such groups often included practitioners who today would be identified as not only Hindu, but also Muslim and Christian, and people of both Indian and (at times also, but to a lesser extent) African descent. At the same time, in the late 19th century, as Indians’ labor contracts ended and they began to form communities off plantations, they elaborated new cultural forms from the plantation and drew on traditions brought from South Asia and recreated in Trinidad, including Phagwa, Rāmlīlā, and Kālī devotion, among others. By the 1920s and early 1930s, Hindu-identified Indian Trinidadian middle-class groups began the highly contentious work of formulating Hinduism as a discrete entity on the model of a “world religion.” They did so by “purifying” Hindu practice in the face of the reformist missionary critiques levelled by the Arya Samaj on the island, adapting Christianity as a model for “orthodox” Hindu social organization. This was authoritatively solidified in the early 1950s with the creation of the island-wide Sanatan Dharma Maha Sabha founded by Bhadase Sagan Maraj. From the mid-20th into the 21st century, Trinidadians have continued to transform and contest Hindu identities and Hinduism in postcolonial Trinidad and Tobago. Major trends shaping these transformations and contestations have included the rise of Creole and composite Trinidadian nationalisms leading to the end of British rule in 1962, new wealth for ritual elaboration and innovation from the oil boom in the 1970s, the rise of new forms of Kālī worship and Sai Baba devotion in the 1970s and 1980s, and political changes through the rise to power and changing fortunes of an Indian Trinidadian-identified political party in the 1990s and early 2000s.