A brief history of Guyanese Indian music & culture

Dear Editor,
I have been asked many times by Indian nationals why Indo-Guyanese still sing, play and enjoy Indian music and its attendant cultural traditions almost 180 years after they were brought here, and lived in slave-like conditions for many of those years. I hope your readership would find interesting the very abbreviated explanation hereunder.
Most Indo-Guyanese came from the Bhojpuri region of India, where the local Bhojpuri culture of music, songs and dances played a seminal role in everyday life. Despised by the creoles and the “massas” for their “alien” ways, these arrivals soon formed almost hermetically sealed, self-sustaining, cultural enclaves on the sugar plantations.
This is Naipaul’s view of these early immigrants: “It was less an uprooting than it appears. With their blinkered view of the world, they were able to recreate eastern Uttar Pradesh, or Bihar, wherever they went. They had been able to ignore the vastness of India, so now they ignored the strangeness in which they had been set.”
Out of the pain of angst, loneliness and nostalgia for beloved ones left behind, they recreated pieces of India in the West Indies.
It was the Bhojpuri region’s folk-music culture that would make up the core of the legacy brought to the West Indies.
The imported Bhojpuri music culture was typically a simple rural folk-song genre, but it was heavily oral-narrative based. It’s widespread use – even today – was of the dholak and dental, in addition to the fact that great emphasis was placed on Bhojpuri words/lyrics to these early performances (contrastingly, the meaning and words of Indo-Guyanese Indian singing today is almost irrelevant!).
Religious practices soon became a standardised set of devotional forms, later coalescing into formal associations. There was a more focused bhakti (devotion) type of worship, rather than rituals. In this new cultural crucible, song sessions created a dynamic where caste hierarchies were gradually cast off, infusing an egalitarian spirit. To a considerable extent, traditional family structures, religious practices and expressive cultural forms were recreated in ethnically homogeneous Indian communities.
Even today, we are familiar with the various Bhojpuri genres – discussed below – that were imported but morphed and coalesced into something uniquely Guyanese.
• The Birha (genre) was one of the most popular to be “imported”. It consisted of a long narrative text set to a simple, repetitive melody, and sung by a solo male singer with accompaniment on the nagara drum pair. Both birha and the nagara are associated with wedding songs. Lamentations for loved ones left behind became standard lyrical fares set to the birha.
• The Sohars genre is associated with childbirth, and is usually sung only by the handful of grandmothers and “aunties” who are able to recall texts. Often, such songs can be performed collectively only with the help of a hired lead singer.
• Nirgun bhajans which are funeral songs.
• Songs associated with the Phagwah or Holi festival, such as the chowtal songs performed by two groups of men. Singing groups, called chowtal groups, became widespread.
• Religious songs. Particularly prominent in this category are the various forms of bhajan, or Hindu devotional songs, which may be sung collectively, or in some cases by a solo singer, at temple services and other functions. (The term “kirtan” is generally used more or less synonymously with “bhajan.”)
• “Ramayana gols”. Verses from the Ramayana are also traditionally chanted by male choruses in a vigorous “give-and-take” style that is similar to chowtal.
These genres persisted, and were maintained almost defensively by the cultural and religious structures that gradually solidified over the decades in the secluded and culturally isolated confines of the sugar plantations. For example, key festivals such as Divali and Phagwa supplanted older “lesser ones” and became prominent; and domestic events like bhagvats (nine-day ritual sessions), pujas (formal prayer sessions), and neighbourhood song sessions called satsangs became prevalent.
Today, although the aforementioned genre has slowly disappeared (but counter-intuitively and fortunately, has sprung up in Guyanese/TT immigrant communities in cosmopolitan NY, Toronto and London), they have given way to Bollywood music and the locally Indo-Caribbean derived Chutney-Soca. But the singing and performance of Bhajans, Bollywood Geets and Ghazals still enjoy privileged status at concerts and Mandirs wherever Indo-Guyanese reside. Virtuoso drummers, like my close friend “Biscuit”, are still prevalent.
Amidst the deculturating effects of the slave plantations and the larger colonial environment, we have managed to recreate those old strands to weave an almost new repertoire and adjusted forms of the Bhojpuri compositions. Naipaul says, “The Indians endured and prospered. The India they re-created was allowed to survive. It was an India in which a revolution had occurred. It was an India in isolation, unsupported; an India without caste or the overwhelming pressures toward caste. The effort had a meaning, and soon India could be seen to be no more than a habit, a self-imposed psychological restraint, wearing thinner with the years.”

Sincerely,
Dev Persaud