of identity
There is a cauldron of confusion as to who is an Indian in the Caribbean, specifically in Guyana, Trinidad and Suriname as well as in the Indian diaspora in Europe and North America.
In the former case, Indians are treated as outsiders in the wider Caribbean except where they are the majority population. In the latter case, Indians are labelled and treated as South Asians. In both cases, they are unhomed, if not homeless, striving and struggling for a niche by themselves for themselves.
I argue elsewhere that Indians have been unhomed thrice: first in India, second in the Caribbean, and third in the Diaspora. Paradoxically, these thrice removed Indians carry a triple consciousness. More on this at another time.
In the Caribbean, Indians are perceived or are expected to behave in creolised ways by the wider Caribbean population. There is this thought that since they left their ancestral home a long time ago they have more commonalties with the southern Caribbean than with India.
Indeed, ever since Indians were brought to the Caribbean to supplant the loss of slave labour in the middle of the nineteenth century they have been subject to analects of analysis. Of all the analyses none has been so confusing and controversial than their identity, that is, who are these people?
Their identity has been analysed through binary opposite views. On the one hand, it is argued that some Indians have retained substantial aspects of their culture (religion, for example) amidst some changes in a predominantly Euro-African Caribbean.
On the other hand, it is argued that some Indians have assimilated (dismissal of caste, for example) to Caribbean norms and values alongside the retention of some aspects of their ancestral culture and custom. These Indians practice selective assimilation as well as engage in accommodated shifts to meet their needs and expectations in their new-found homeland.
In recent times, the discussion of Indian identity in the Caribbean has shifted from the binary opposite argument of cultural retention and assimilation to creolisation. The core of the creolisation argument is that since Indians have lost their caste system and have now adjusted to the Caribbean class system, they have become creolised like Africans.
In the Caribbean context, creolisation is a process whereby post-emancipation Caribbean people have developed a way of life different and distinct from their original homeland—Europe, Africa, and Asia. Accordingly, new forms of social organisation, language, religion, and values emerged to replace and reshape old ones.
European and African traditions were merged into a system that was neither totally like Europe nor Africa but uniquely Caribbean with more emphasis on African ways or Africanness.
For example, an average African person in the Caribbean may look like someone in Africa or Europe but does not speak like someone in Africa or in Europe unless he or she has lived in those regions for some time.
creolisation emerged mainly from European and African traditions (colonialism, slavery, resistance, etc) in the Caribbean. For many Africans, creolisation is not only a form of identity but is a concept or a place to begin to recover the Africa that was lost during slavery.
Though Indians have also experienced aspects of European and African traditions, that is, creolisation, through for instance the educational system, its application to Indians as a form of identity is limited in Guyana, Trinidad, and Suriname— home to the majority of Indians in the Caribbean.
The first limitation is that to say Indians have embraced a creolised identity would imply not only that they have experienced a social process that is Euro-African but they have given up their Indianness, or any customs associated with India. Many Hindus and Muslims live in the Caribbean.
The second limitation is that the concept of a creole identity ignores the spirit of agency among Indians and suggests that they are incapable of retaining their Indian customs in the Caribbean. I wrote elsewhere that creolisation is predominately black, marginally white and faintly brown.
I will in the future provide some alternative views on Indian identity (for example, ethno-local and ethno-national), which I believe, have gone undetected by analysts.
For now, the purpose here is to provide some information for the growing disdain, disappointment and faddish embrace emanating from the Ministry of Social Cohesion on national unity. This Ministry has a talismanic presence in Guyana (President’s baby) but it is displaced and obfuscated by staid visions. Unfortunately, it would take a crane of thoughts and actions to lift the Ministry of Social Cohesion out of its current moribund motion.
