The last few weeks have been rife with stories about Indians. The Indian Arrival gang did a reenactment, complete with ethnic costumes, ships and wailing about how awful Indentureship was.
The redoubtable chief of the Sanatan Dharma Maha Sabha, Sat Maharaj, representative of a large body of orthodox Hindus, has been at the forefront of the debate that shouldn't even be a joke–whether child marriage should be legal. Even though the SDMS has been contradicted by Hindu Women's Organisation, that the position can be held and confidently articulated by anyone is a defeat.
Let's not forget the rest of the Indian community. Always lurking in the background is the Indian political party, still too woozy to take seriously after its five-year bender in the treasury. Throw in, for good measure, the legion of wealthy Indian lawyers and doctors and other professionals who seem to dominate their respective professions, and you have the accepted typology of Indians in 2016 Trinidad. Religious, hardworking, overachieving, locked in an Orientalist mind-world, a little dodgy.
It's a picture of an ethnic, not a national, community to which there seems to be no contradiction. But the picture is wrong, as is the assumed history–Indentureship, mystical religion and insularity. As the two pictures re-published here (originally seen in this newspaper in 1934) show, much has been lost in the interim.
The first photo "Milk Sellers Boarding a Train" was taken by Guillermo Brathwaite, and won the Guardian's weekly photo contest, of December 2, 1934. The image tells a familiar story: Indian peasants, traditional ethnic clothing, their milk containers on their heads. Up from Indenture, yet still within the precincts of agriculture and animal husbandry. It's also a picture of self-sufficiency and incipient entrepreneurship which seems to persist in and irk the mind of Creole Trinidad.
The other picture, however, tells an unknown story. It was published three weeks after the first, on the Guardian's Indian News and Views page, on December 20, 1934. It seems simple enough; a wedding photo, of Mr Mohammed Hosein and his wife, formerly Ms Imelda Welch.
In particular, this frozen image tells another story of Indians who had made their way into Trinidad into ordinary, quotidian lives, minus ethnic costumes and shadow of Indenture.
This isn't a recent phenomenon. In 1878, the Trinidad Chronicle newspaper observed that one in five burgesses of San Fernando was Asiatic. There were Indian newspapers from 1898, starting with the Koh I Noor, published in English. Around the turn of the century, Indian names began appearing in the Masonic lodge lists, and political/cultural associations formed, like the East Indian National Congress, and literary and debating societies.
The Guardian, in the 1930s, felt the Indians were underrepresented in the national mosaic, and launched its Indian affairs page. On the same day Mr and Mrs Hosein's wedding photo was published, were articles on early Hindi Literature, the philosophy of Yoga, news from India, and local social events, like Indian friendly society meetings.
This page ran for several years, and was, for a time, written by Seepersad Naipaul, whose son won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001. That achievement is emblematic of the missing dimension of Indian life in Trinidad–the social, intellectual, and integrative impulses of the community–which seem to have disappeared and replaced by a banal ethnic atavism.
(Continued next week)
