I am not sure where the word or the term dougla comes from but I think it is of Hindu origin meaning mix. In Guyana, a dougla is a mixed person of African and Indian heritage. An estimated 12-14 per cent of Guyana’s population is dougla. Douglarization, which refers to the biological and cultural mixing of Africans and Indians, began when Indians arrived in Guyana in the nineteenth century as indentured servants. Continuous contact between both ethnic groups has undoubtedly led to a noticeable dougla reality and a distinct dougla identity.
What is not certain, however, is the concept and interpretation of douglarization, which remains largely ambiguous mainly because its level of acceptance varies according to time and place.
Historically, and especially during indenture, the mere presence of a dougla person was a sense of shame, born out of the plantation tensions between Africans and Indians and sustained mainly by the ruling European class to ensure their security. The presence of dougla person then, and less so now, represents bastardisation, an embarrassment to ethnic loyalty and cultural patrimony from both Africans and Indians.
Research as well as ethno-graphic observations reveal that a dougla person is accepted more in the African than in the Indian community for two broad reasons. The first is that Africans have been in Guyana for a longer period of time than Indians and have experienced racial mixing, free or forced. They have over time displayed less reservation to racial mixing than most ethnic groups in Guyana.
The second is that Indians arrived in Guyana with a caste structure that encouraged insular ethno-relations such as endogamy. The practice of caste insularity did not survive in Guyana but the ideology of ethnic exclusiveness, rightly or wrongly so, did survive in some sections of Guyana.
To maintain traditional cultural norms (such as arranged marriages) of their departed homeland, Indians went to great lengths to protect themselves from racial mixing. Those Indians who did mix normally had closer relationships with Africans or had been, for the most part, at the lower end of Guyana’s class structural continuum and distant from the everyday life of Indians.
Later in the middle of twentieth century, particularly during the period of gradual urbanisation, douglarization became more noticeable among the upper and middle class Indians and Africans.
Professor Bridget Brereton argues that the practice of rejection of other cultural norms amongst Indians emerged from the desire to protect the Indian culture from being absorbed in the Creole culture. Put differently, the rejection of other cultural norms means the reconstruction of Indian culture within or among their cultural domains. For example, Brahmin Indians were influential in resisting Christianisation of their children and community.
Whenever douglarization occurs, whether according to class or location, there is this question of acceptance, which is not normally associated with other forms of racial mixing, like for example, between Indians and Europeans, between Africans and Chinese or Amerindians in Guyana. What this implies is that douglarization is strictly an Indian-African cultural uniqueness in Guyana, and of course, in Trinidad.
What is also interesting is that the level of acceptance of douglarization does not begin with the dougla offspring but with the mixed couple union. If an Indian woman marries or lives with an African man, she is most likely to be ostracised by her Indian family, sometimes for life, although this rejection is seen more in rural than urban areas. If an Indian man marries or lives with an African woman, he will most likely be able to enter both communities—African and Indian—although with some apprehension. He may be ridiculed by his Indian family for marrying an African woman. If the above situation is reversed, there is less apprehension towards the African man or woman in the African community. Also, if a dougla person is raised in the African community, he or she is most likely to assume a Creole identity and develop little in-depth knowledge of the Indian side of the family. The opposite generally happens if the dougla person is raised on the Indian side of the family.
Paradoxically, a dougla person inherits a bi-biological and bi-cultural world at birth but experiences neither fully through life primarily because of agnostic social relations between Africans and Indians, although, again, this varies according to class and location. One question generally asked about douglarization is whether or not it is a one-generation experience. Speaking from a biological perspective, it is only for one generation since further mixing would dilute biological aspects of douglarization, that is, the 50 per cent African and the 50 per cent Indian. One must caution that the reality of douglarization is not grounded in only biological concepts, but it can be broadened to include cultural mixing such as in music: Soca and Chutney.
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