Indo-Caribbean Feminist Epistemology: A Personal and Scholarly Journey

Preeia D. Surajbali

This chapter has been inspired by my tertiary educational journey, highlighting the ways in which Indo-Caribbean feminist scholarship has influenced how I and many other young Indian women have come to understand ourselves as Caribbean people (Hosein and Outar 2017). Drawing on several scholars of Indo-Caribbean feminism, I discuss how the scholarly work of Indo-Caribbean feminist predecessors has shaped the emergence of Indo-Caribbean feminist epistemology and been indispensable to the identity formation of younger generations of Indo- Caribbean feminist scholars.¹

My parents separately migrated from Guyana to Canada where they eventually met and married in their early twenties. They have always been sure of who they are—Guyanese Canadian migrants whose forefathers came from India—but have often struggled to link their roots/routes to a particular place because of the many soils embedded with their genealogical footprints. Inheriting this lineage and wanting to historicize the Indianness and Caribbeanness which shape my embodied identity as a

P.D. Surajbali (H)

University of Toronto (OISE) Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, Toronto, Canada

G.J. Hosein, L. Outar (eds.), Indo-Caribbean Feminist Thought, New Caribbean Studies, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-55937-1_3

Canadian woman, I turned to the academy as a young undergraduate student for answers. It was here that I realized that claiming membership within the Indian diaspora was often not adequate to express my complex transnational relationship and sense of belonging to both India and the Caribbean, along with my citizenship and residence as a Canadian. The majority of the texts I read only confirmed my sense of displacement since, unless the specific subject of inquiry, Indo-Caribbean subjectivity ceases to be little more than an honorable mention within larger monographs about the Indian diaspora; most accounts focus on migration from the subcontinent to Canada, the United Kingdom, and the USA. As Brinda Mehta asserts: “Indo-Caribbean women writers ... have been subject to a particular literary and cultural eclipsing by their black counterparts, by the diasporic hegemony of South Asian writers from North America and Britain and by men and women writers from India” (Mehta 2004, 1).²

For example, in India Abroad: Diasporic Cultures of Postwar America and England, South Asian academic Sandhya Shukla asserts that “other forms of Indianness—say, in the Caribbean or East-Africa—do not fall out of sight, but instead become incorporated as secondary and related possibilities” (Shukla 2003, 4; emphasis mine). What this observation infers is that, while negating “origin” based identities should be a theoretical tenet of transnational diasporic research, the proximity of one’s direct lineage to India often contours the symbolic and material realities of cultural citizenship and belonging within the Indian diaspora. Shukla herself alludes to this when she notes: “we can never underestimate the power of national feeling in a world where nations are still dominant ... [;] no figure or text in diaspora lives outside of nationality (Shukla 2003, 250; emphasis mine). However, I am inclined to suggest that Indo-Caribbean identity is a status and subject of inquiry that does in fact live outside of nationality, uniquely straddling nationalities, histories, and cultural facets that are both Indian and Caribbean-based. Writing over twenty years ago, in “The Next Indo-Caribbean Generation in Canada,” Kamala-Jean Gopie alluded to the complexities of identity claiming for many Indo-Caribbean Canadian migrants of that time when she wrote:

Are we still invisible people? What role are we currently playing in our new home? Is the ethnic and cultural legacy which connects us to both India and the Caribbean valued? Do we find ourselves caught in a labeling dilemma of being neither fish nor fowl, that is, not really ‘South-Asians,’ Canada’s term for people who come directly from India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, etc., yet falling outside the West Indian label which refers usually to Afro-Caribbeans or Blacks? (Gopie 1993, 63)

Gopie’s observations remain relevant to a younger generation of Indo- Caribbean women who, like their predecessors, continue to navigate experiences of identity ambiguity. Channeling sentiments similar to Gopie’s penned over a decade prior, in Being Brown in a Small White Town: Young Guyanese Women Negotiate Identities in Canada, Stephanie Cheddie reflects upon her own experiences of identity displacement when she notes:

[I]n my early twenties, I found myself to be “too brown” to be from Sarnia [a small, white, Canadian suburban town], “too coconut like” to be the proper Guyanese, and “too quasi-Guyanese” to be the “proper Indian.” Hence, how my “race” is transformed in the different social spaces that I have inhabited has become a salient issue for me. (Cheddie 2005, 2)

While Gopie and Cheddie’s sentiments are similar, the lacuna which separates them generationally has shaped the emergence of a richly discursive and poetic space for theorizations that build upon the wisdom and work of previous generations of Indo-Caribbean women. Through scholarship, a younger cohort of Indo-Caribbean women like myself have come to recognize that several decades ago, scholars, novelists, and poets—including Kamala-Jean Gopie, Ramabai Espinet, Patricia Mohammed, and Rawwida Baksh—did the groundbreaking work of acknowledging and writing Indo-Caribbean (women’s) identities into existence, highlighting the state of ambivalence which often accompanies the diasporic status of Indo-Caribbean people. Time passed has fueled the emergence of a uniquely Indo-Caribbean feminist epistemology which has been shaped by the application of a women-centered, jahaji-bhain lens to understandings of Indo-Caribbean history and identity as well as by the materialization of theoretical notions, including kala pani hybridity and dougla poetics, that were not available to Gopie when she wrote several decades ago. In other words, contemporary scholars of Indo-Caribbean feminism have drawn upon the insights of their predecessors to validate and legitimize Indo-Caribbean women’s subjectivities as well as the ambiguities that often underscore Indo-Caribbean identity; this has been theoretically and poetically reflected in the works of Gaiutra Bahadur, Peggy Mohan, Mariam Pirbhai, Shani Mootoo, Shalini Puri, and Brinda Mehta whom I draw upon in this chapter.

The growing production and curation of work by Indo-Caribbean women coupled with the increased presence of such women as professors, educators, and activists in the academy has been important to notions of identity and belonging for younger generations of Indo-Caribbean women; for me, the most influential of these women has been scholar- activist-poet, Ramabai Espinet. When I was an undergraduate, Espinet introduced me to a range of works by Indo-Caribbean writers and thinkers, including Shani Mootoo, Patricia Mohammed, Aisha Khan, and Rosanne Kanhai, which was crucial for coming to terms with my sense of identity as a young adult; I finally saw aspects of myself reflected in the texts I was reading and in the charismatic woman who was teaching me about them.³I was encouraged to view identity politics as a legitimate field of academic inquiry and to pull from my own repertoire of personal experiences to feed my intellectual curiosities and investigations. This, I think, is one of the hallmarks of Indo-Caribbean feminist epistemology and animates the writing of several established and emerging scholars (myself included) in this book. For example, in her chapter, Gabrielle Hosein asserts that she has “turned to scholarship to think through ... [her] own intersections of Caribbean, Indian, woman, mother and feminist, and to explore particularities of experience especially defined by the bodies we occupy and their phenotypical meanings” (Hosein 2017, 219).

Hosein’s sentiments reveal the way that scholarship both reflects and shapes discourses about Indo-Caribbean identity politics. By turning to the repertoire of Indo-Caribbean scholarship—which spans several decades—to engage in scholarly production herself, Hosein’s sentiments also suggest that the work of Indo-Caribbean feminists has been an intergenerational undertaking that challenges the intellectual terrain around theoretical notions of “authentic” Indianness and Caribbeanness. This continued, intergenerational work has created a growing platform for several initiatives.

First, it has legitimized the diasporic dislocation of Indo-Caribbean people and has provided many younger Indo-Caribbean students and scholars a place from which to situate and further negotiate their sense of Indo-Caribbean identity from both personal and scholarly vantage points. For example, Gaiutra Bahadur’s monograph, Coolie Woman, seamlessly weaves the historical and archival research of her great-grandmother’s indentureship records in relation to her own identity negotiations as an Indo-Caribbean American woman.⁴ Bahadur notes: “the riches I was after were stories: theirs, my great-grandmother’s, my own.

Call it a quest for identity, or an exploration for narrative gold. Even use the awful word “roots.” It may be cliched, but it’s raw and nervy and real nonetheless” (Bahadur 2013, 176). Similarly, acknowledging that “at the heart of ... [her novel] ... are all the old people from Central Trinidad who spoke Bhojpuri into ... [her] tape recorder back in the 1970s” (Mohan 2007, ix), Peggy Mohan’s Jahajin serves as a fictional, semi-autobiographical exemplar whose unnamed narrator—inspired by Mohan’s first occupational incarnation “as a linguist specializing in Trinidadian Bhojpuri” (Mohan 2007, i)—traces her family’s matrilineal indentureship history. This type of the fictionalized memory work, or what Patricia Mohammed has called the mythopoetics, of Indo-Caribbean women novelists is particularly important since such women

arguably work in tandem with historians in the memorialisation and excavation of women’s narratives, for they not only strive to fill in historical gaps but also to mobilize these stories as models of cultural and feminist agency for present generations [of Indo-Caribbean women.] (Pirbhai in Ward 2013, 272)

In other words, there is a powerful and imperative synergy established between the creative and theoretical wherein the “poiesis or imaginative truths” (Mohammed 2009, 65) honed by Indo-Caribbean female novelists often inspires the mobilization of theorizations which encourage more fluid understandings of Indianness and Caribbeanness.

Second, the scholarly and poetic projects of Indo-Caribbean feminists have also provided many with an intellectual and creative dais to raise awareness about a range of issues—including domestic violence and poverty—that affect various communities within and beyond the Caribbean archipelago, and this has often informed praxis for social change with scholars, activists, and organizations of various stripes. For example, Jahajee Sisters: Empowering Indo-Caribbean Women, based in New York, was established “in response to Indo-Caribbean, gender-based oppression and the silence surrounding it” (Jahajee Sisters website) which its founders observed. Since its inauguration, Jahajee Sisters has generated a diverse, intergenerational constituency of Indo- Caribbean women including scholars, educators, artists, and writers, who, through various workshops, programs, and events, have built a network of resources and support for the emotional and physical wellbeing of American-based Indo-Caribbean women.

Another organization that allows Indo-Caribbean women to belong to a transnational Caribbean community, and to which I myself have contributed, is Women Speak. This on-line space for women to share experiences of discrimination “in the home, in the workplace and in the public domain” (Women Speak website) was founded by Indo-Trinidadian poet- activist Simone Leid. She asserts that this digital platform provides a place “where women can express how ... experiences [of discrimination] have affected them ... and can help them to think critically about the ways their everyday lives have been affected by these incidents” (ibid.). This, Leid notes, creates a community of empathy, often serving as the “impetus for [Caribbean] women (and men) to create their own movement and advocate for ... [women’s] issues ... on a personal, group, or national basis” (ibid.). The community of empathy which Leid writes of has also been an important objective of Red Thread in Guyana, a grassroots organization committed to mobilizing interethnic collaboration and sustainable income generation among poor Guyanese women. The organization has garnered mention within the literature by scholars Alissa Trotz and Brinda Mehta who, through the penning of their theoretical analysis, demonstrate the way that scholarship and activism is often bridged.⁵

Considering the contributions of Indo-Caribbean women to multiethnic Caribbean feminist organizations like Red Thread and Women Speak underscores the importance of acknowledging that Indo-Caribbean feminist epistemology has historically emerged from a place of comradery, adopting an inclusive strategy which calls upon the diverse demographic of the Caribbean and the Indian diaspora to till the theoretical, pedagogical, creative, and epistemological ground from which dominant narratives about Indianness and Caribbeanness emerge. Over two decades ago, Espinet alluded to the need for such a strategy when she asserted:

[T]he experience of Indo-Caribbean people should not remain within their relative isolated community. It is part of the general historical movement of peoples into this archipelago and as such belongs to all, impacts on all and should be known by all ... [T]he argument goes that if [the] intellectual knowledge is to be enlarged then Indians must begin to do that for themselves. Why? Is the Indo-Caribbean experience not part of our common heritage as Caribbean [and diasporic Indian] people? (quoted in Gregg 1998,84)

Over the years, many feminist scholars have taken stock of Espinet’s sentiments. Rosanne Kanhai acknowledges that numerous Afro-Caribbean women “have been friends, colleagues and mentors who have genuinely listened to the protests of Indo-Caribbean women ... and have worked to dismantle ethnic divisions and omissions” (Kanhai 2012, 3). For example, Joy Mahabir and Miriam Pirbhai note that, in addition to Patricia Mohammed, Black Caribbean feminist scholars Rhoda Reddock and Verene A. Shepherd

have identified the systematic exclusion of Indo-Caribbean women in mainstream sociology and histography ... [and] have provided some of the pioneering studies on the social history of Indo-Caribbean women ... [including their historical] transatlantic crossing, the gendered effects of plantation policies during and after indentureship, and the social-political mobility of women in the post-colonial period. (Mahabir and Pirbhai 2012, 16)

Several South-Asian scholars have also addressed the literary and theoretical eclipsing of Indo-Caribbean subjectivities from understandings of Indianness by contributing to the repertoire of kala pani discourses and poetics that have been shaped by the emergence of a distinctly Indo- Caribbean feminist epistemology.⁶ Kala pani discourse metaphorically names and remedies the displacement of women’s place in indentureship history which has been ideologically marked by a “singular, subaltern, patriarchal, heterosexual, jahaji-bhai (ship brothers) plantation experience” (Pirbhai 2010, 38). Informed by a “feminist epistemology of cane,” which gives voice to the “female cane-cutter of Indian extraction in the Caribbean context” (Espinet 1989, 3), kala pani poetics “uncovers a literature that emerges from a nexus that has been silenced, objectified and marginalized” (Mehta 2004, 7). It signals what Pirbhai has deemed

a figurative shift in emphasis from the jahaji-bhai to the matrilineal chain of the jahaji-bhain, a female-centered principle of affiliation . This not only involves an insertion of jahaji-bhairfs stories into the diasporic and national imaginary, but also produces a critical rereading of the very terms of affiliation outside the restrictive parameters of ethnicity, fixed racial constructs, religion and caste, in the awareness that Indo-Caribbean identities have themselves been creolized and transformed by the new world experience. (Pirbhai 2010, 39)

For example, South Asian feminist scholar, Brinda Mehta’s monograph, Diasporic (Dis)locations: Indo-Caribbean Women Writers Negotiate the Kala Pani remains one of the most valuable resources I have drawn upon as a student since it serves as a comprehensive primer about the jahaji- bhain poetics of a great number of Indo-Caribbean women writers—many of whom I had no knowledge about prior to entering the academy—and highlights several theoretical discourses, including kala pani hybridity which shapes Indo-Caribbean feminist epistemology. Mehta asserts:

[Kala pani] hybridity calls for the recognition of those individual feminisms that have theretofore been invisible in national deliberations on women’s issues by underlining the need for parity among different feminisms ... In this way while embracing a more widespread interracial agenda of articulation, kala pani hybridity ... affirm[s] the particularities of experience of Indian women at the same time as they project the visibility of this experience on the national canvas through the principle of equitable representation. (Mehta 2004, 17)

Similarly, Shalini Puri’s conceptualization of dougla poetics has provided an influential and alternative discourse to dominant conceptions of Caribbean creolization that often reflect a cultural aesthetic which privileges European and African identities. Puri discursively draws upon the original definition of dougla: a person of mixed Indian and African heritage—an identity that simultaneously situates and displaces Indianness in the Caribbean—and shifts its vernacular, offering an alternative “poetics and politics of cultural hybridity” (Puri 2004, 222). She notes that dougla poetics offers “a means for articulating potentially progressive cultural identities de-legitimized by both dominant culture and the Mother Culture ... [and] draws attention to the reality of interracial contact; it names a contact that already exists” (Puri 1997, 157) and “could provide a vocabulary for disallowed, de-legitimized racial identities” (Puri 2004, 222).⁷

It is the production and consumption of jahaji-bhain discourses by Indo-Caribbean women themselves, however, that primarily continues to inspire and shape the emergence of Indo-Caribbean feminist epistemology. Prime examples of such work include Ryhaan Shah’s novel, A Silent Life; Espinet’s narrative, The Swinging Bridge; Bahadur and Mohan’s previously discussed writings, as well as Shani Mootoo’s fictional anthology, Out on Main Street, which sparked my initial interest and awareness of Indo-Caribbean feminist discourse as an undergraduate. While I found myself relating to Mootoo’s vivid descriptions of her protagonist’s feelings of being “not properly Trinidadian ... not Indian ... certainly not white and hardly Canadian either” (Mootoo 1993, 60), it has been the interface of consciously connecting her feminist poetics—which unsettle dominant, heteronormative, and patriarchal discourses about (Caribbean) Indianness and womanness—to the pedagogies of, and my relationships with, Indo- Caribbean mentors, over the past decade—both within and beyond the classroom—that has been indispensable to my sense of identity. In other words, my coming into being as an Indo-Caribbean woman is linked to the meaningful role both Indo-Caribbean feminist scholarship and Indo- Caribbean women of various stripes and generations have played in my life; this has served as an important impetus for my current Ph.D. work.

My research follows Patricia Mohammed’s call for investigations that draw upon the educational trajectories of Indo-Caribbean women in order to explore facets of identity formation and gender consciousness which she notes “remains ... unmapped not just for Indo-Caribbean women but a ripe area of exploration for Caribbean feminism” (Mohammed 2017, 32). I will be considering how Indo-Caribbean women navigate spaces of higher education, what they bring to it, what their occupational and life goals are, and how these processes and aspirations may be shaped by familial, community, and high school histories and pedagogies as well as cultural and religious beliefs and negations. Framing my research in relation to my evolving understanding of Indo-Caribbean feminist epistemology, it is my hope that my doctoral work will productively challenge and extend representational and conceptual understandings of Indian identities, contributing to a growing and imperative body of interdisciplinary knowledge production.

I see Indo-Caribbean feminist epistemology not only as a discursive, poetic, and theoretical strategy among feminist scholars, artists, and activists but as an ethos which informs the way I choose to frame my identity and the type of knowledge production and teaching I aspire to as I progress in the academy. That is, to situate my Indo-Caribbean womanness and theorize it in ways that celebrate the multiple identity footings my great-great-grandparents’ kalapani crossings afford me and to transgress the permeable, though ideologically intact, disciplinary boundaries of South Asian and Caribbean Studies in my own academic work and pedagogy. The implications of this disciplinary transgression brings us to the very pages of this book, Indo-Caribbean Feminist Thought: Genealogies, Theories, Enactments, whose contributors (themselves a melange of scholarly, generational, religious, and ancestral backgrounds) and contributions (which situate Indo-Caribbeanness within, across, and beyond India and the Caribbean) inspire new ways of understanding and acknowledging a distinctly Indo-Caribbean (women’s) presence in histories of the past, present, and future.

Notes

1. The scholars and authors with whom I engage include women of both South Asian and Indo-Caribbean heritage. As I reiterate later in the chapter, the strength of Indo-Caribbean feminist epistemology’s ethos is enhanced by allies of various stripes whose works problematize fixed notions of Indianness and Caribbeanness which do not readily accommodate the “finer nuances of Indo-Caribbeanness, an indeterminate subjectivity that resists epistemological fixity” (Mehta 2004, 10).
2. The threefold literary eclipsing of Indo-Caribbean women writers is often inherently tied to the “scholarly politics” undergirding Area Studies departments at tertiary institutions. For example, Rawwida Baksh (1998) and Brinda Mehta (2004) note that academics have perhaps been slower to meaningfully investigate Indo-Caribbeanness in relation to Indo transnationality since Indian women like themselves “have generally come to an analysis of colonialism largely through an Afro-centered discourse promoted at the University” (Mehta 2004, 15).
3. Importantly, however, I also recognize that some of the most important Indo-Caribbean feminist work is and has been done not by published intellectuals but by (extra)ordinary Indo-Caribbean women across the globe via conversations, life experiences, and familial artifacts they have produced and shared with their children, grandchildren, siblings, and friends. In other words, I came to consciously recognize the feminist imperatives of my mother in ways that are similar to Andil Gosine’s discussion of his mother’s “wrecking work” in his chapter of this book. Specifically, I came to appreciate my mother’s choice to sacrifice her successful corporate career to raise four daughters, not as a conformation to traditional gender expectations, but as a strategy which allowed her to more readily support and encourage the trying and triumphant personal, political, and educational gender negotiations and navigations of her children as we grew into young women.
4. This is also evidenced through the growing number of identity-based dissertations by Indo-Caribbean women which have cropped up in recent years, including Gabrielle Hosein’s M.Phil. thesis, Gender, Generation and Negotiation: Young Indo-Trinidadian Women’s Identities in the Late Twentieth Century (2004) and Stephanie Cheddie’s M.A. thesis, Being Brown in a Small White Town: Young Guyanese Women Negotiate Identities in Canada (2005).
5. See Brinda Mehta’s Diasporic (Dis)locations: Indo-Caribbean Women Writers Negotiate the Kala Pani (2004), pages 103-105 and Alissa Trotz’s “Red Thread: The Politics of Hope in Guyana” (2007).
6. Important too is the self-reflexive work that often accompanies such scholars’ studies of (Caribbean) Indianness, which is itself an important component to shifting personal and theoretical discourses about Indian authenticity, identity, and belonging. For example, in Mobilizing India, Tejaswini Niranjana reflects upon her own (South Asian) Indianness in relation to that of Indo-Caribbean women when she says:

I am what I am because of who the East-Indian [Indo-Caribbean] woman in Trinidad is. A central concern of this book, therefore, will be to create a space where we might productively bring together the question of women in India with the question of women in Trinidad in such a way as to reposition and add nuance to the frames with which both are customarily discussed. (Niranjana 2006, 20)

7. While its elaboration is beyond the scope of this chapter, Khal Torabully’s theory of coolitude is worthy of mention since its theoretical facets overlap with Indo-Caribbean feminism’s advocacy of mobilizing more fluid conceptualizations of identity and belonging. As Mehta notes, coolitude is an important cross-cultural theorization of diasporic positionality “which seeks to transcend the limitation of local identity politics by embracing a larger diasporic consciousness, while retaining Indian distinctiveness at the same time in an intersectional overlapping of the particular and the universal” (2010, 4).

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