Education as Revolutionary Praxis

Despite the efforts from the 1940s onwards of Hindus and Muslims to establish primary schools and, later on, secondary schools for girls, the lion’s share of early Indo-Caribbean female education was conveyed through Presbyterian schools or other Christian denominational bodies. This created the basis for a dual or double consciousness among Indian women and men. While absorbing the liberal Western ideas of Christianity, gender ideologies and practices in homes, villages, and communities in which they gathered were still informed by the fundamental teachings of Hinduism and Islam. Education and access to learning, jobs, mixing with other groups, and earning a living allowed them the room for negotiating within families and communities. The erosion of traditional gender roles is challenging both because they affect privileges of those who benefit from them and because they admit to social change, which is always difficult for people to come to terms with.

In “The Creolization of Indian Women in Trinidad” (1988), I argued that ideas of nationalism also infused itself into communities, like mine, who had experienced firsthand the transition from empire to independence. With expanded access to schooling at both primary and secondary levels, through secular and denominational efforts, from the 1960s onwards, young Indian girls in Trinidad were no different from their peers in terms of their access to education. The idea that boys in the family, their brothers and cousins, had a greater entitlement to be educated had been diminished if not completely eroded. By the 1990s, there was a further expansion of educational possibilities of tertiary education due to the existence of a regional University of the West Indies; the increased career possibilities for women in teaching, nursing, medicine, commerce, and law; and a greater awareness of new sexual freedoms. Gabrielle Hosein (2012) argues that in an era that had accepted gender equality as normative for Indian girls who came of age by the turn of the twentieth century, new technologies of communication, travel, and diasporic mixing had transformed a relatively simple formula I had employed of interlocking or competing identities of Indianness with Creoleness and a conceptual shift from negotiating with patriarchy to navigating new conceptions of femininity itself. This arrival of a new consciousness of gender and ethnic identity seems embedded in the transformative possibilities of education, and remains unmapped terrain, not just for Indo-Caribbean women but a ripe area of exploration for Caribbean feminism.¹¹

New alliances were formed by the late twentieth century. Within Trinidad in the post-independence years, both the male-dominated trade unions and leftist organizations expanded their militancy to absorb women under the guise of acceding to second-wave feminist demands, giving rise to such organizations in Trinidad as Concerned Women for Progress and

Working Women. Global anti-sexual violence ideas led to the establishment of the first Rape Crisis Centre in the Caribbean in Port of Spain in 1985 to which I was appointed Coordinator. In the regional Caribbean Association for Feminist Research and Action, Rawwida Baksh would soon take a leadership role as its first appointed Coordinator. Out of these organizations would emerge a small but visible group of Indo-Caribbean women whose scholarship was combined with activism. What this signaled for the first time was a defined link between a now proclaimed second-wave feminist activism and scholarship, again underscoring the value of Wollstonecraft’s insight on the potential value of education as a chemical reagent for women’s continued empowerment.