The Spectator, Feminism and the Public Sphere

The place of Indians within a Caribbean public sphere was a particularly fraught question in the early and mid-twentieth centuries. George Lamming, for example, notable throughout his career for emphasizing the transformative effect of what he calls “the arrival of the East—India and China—in the Caribbean Sea” (1960, 36) ends up in a 1958 novel Of Age and Innocence mapping his fears about weak nationalism in the region onto easily available stereotypes of Indian clannishness. In Edgar Mittelholzer’s A Morning at the Office (1950), we find Indians, within the public setting of a corporate office in Port of Spain, associated with reminders of a shameful past (in particular the hard labor of the cane fields) which work against goals of establishing middle-class respectability and disproving colonial expectations of backwardness (Outar 2015). These are examples of a common distrust of what Indian claiming of public space might mean and of the belief that such a claiming could only be achieved at the expense of nationalist goals. Part of what looking at the early and mid-twentieth century suggests is that Indian engagement with the public sphere was a complicated affair.

In Trinidad, we find local Indian writing in the form of small monthly journals that were largely middle class, often emerging from Indian cultural clubs of the 1930s and 1940s. These were publications that stood at the intersections of the journalistic and the literary and were part of the Windrush Era’s “broad base of literary activity” that Alison Donell (2015) and others describe, broader than we or the more celebrated writers themselves acknowledge. My research suggests that they were part of a largely effaced tradition of early twentieth-century writing, only partly visible within the myth of origin of Windrush writing.

Elsewhere (see Outar 2015), I describe these journals which explored cultural links to India but also to Africa, the USA, Canada, Fiji and many other sites, as containing the seeds of “trojan nationalism” a term coined by Arjun Appadurai to describe nationalist discourses that “contain transnational, subnational links and, more generally, nonnational identities and aspirations” (2003, 165). I used this term deliberately since the expectation of Indian betrayal seemed very much on the mind of the canonical writers and politicians committed to the goals of nation building or cultural rejection of colonial status.

The Spectator was published in Port of Spain from 1948 to 1965. It circulated to at least twenty-nine different towns in Trinidad and to British

Guiana and claimed subscribers in London, East and South Africa, Canada and the USA. Its chief editor was Dennis Mahabir (1920-1992) who started the journal after he returned to Trinidad in 1946 from England where he studied law. He was very much part of the literary scene on the island before he left—writing for both the Minerva Review and for what was to become a rival publication in both readership and political philosophies, the Observer, edited by H.P. Singh.

The Spectator had correspondents writing from Canada, Sri Lanka, London, and the USA and reprinted pieces from publications across the globe. What was clear was the interest of the journal in the world outside of Trinidad, and not simply in India. Images of India and the pantheon of Indian figures like Gandhi, Nehru and Tagore were engaged as ways of pushing back against stereotypes of coolie status and all of its attendant shame and shaming, but we also find a broader understanding of Indianness than simply one that was tied to the subcontinent. The Spectator reported often on and showed intense interest in events in places such as Fiji, Mauritius and South Africa that shared a history of indenture- ship. The journal also regularly featured world news highlighting racial segregation in the USA and apartheid practices involving even hearses in South Africa. The cover of a 1950 issue called for a boycott of South African goods with its text reading “Coloureds and Indians are treated as Outcasts in that country ...” So while the appearance of advertisements for other publications like “The Indian: At Home and Overseas: A Political, Cultural and Trade Review” published monthly in London for “4 million overseas Indians” showed an explicit connection being made to a larger network of diasporic Indian writing and an understanding of Indo-Caribbeans as being one prong in a broad Indian diaspora, we also see something more complex. We see reflected here Michelle Stephens’ argument about colonial subjects who “strengthened] their individual nationalist struggles and aspirations through transnational race-based networks” (Stephens 2005, 3), but we also see a movement outside of simple racial identification to a politics of solidarity across race in multiethnic societies, one that was as resonant for the local particularities of South Africa as it was for Trinidad. The correlating result of this world view for the Spectator was reflected in an ardent support of West Indian Federation which some of the other Trinidadian Indian publications feared for its potential marginalizing of Indian political interests.

One writer for the Spectator peeks enticingly out from the historical record. Dr. Amala Ramcharan was listed on the masthead as an Associate

Editor of the journal from 1948 to 1952, making her one of the earliest recognized Indo-Caribbean women writers. Now in her nineties, living in India and known by her married name of Amala Chaudhuri, she declares that her involvement in the journal was actually minimal and that she was too focused on her medical studies in Canada to pursue writing. This too is part of the intriguing story about writing and women during this era. Chaudhuri was writing and asserts a deep love of literature, but her writing came up against a choice she had to make between a commitment to the literary and the pursuit of professional and individual advancement in the face of societal conditions that often challenged the importance of educating girls, especially Indian girls. And yet Indian women were making profound strides in this period and, before it, as the life of Dr. Stella Abidh and writer Grace Nobbee suggest. In 1950, for example, the pages of the Spectator reveal an announcement of V.S. Naipaul’s plans to leave Trinidad for Oxford, but also announcements of the progress of Indo- Trinidadian women who were going abroad to study as scholarship winners or returning home from foreign studies.

Regardless of the circumscribed public visibility of Indian female writers (Chaudhuri tells me too of her sister Savitri Ramcharan Purshottam—who was the first Trinidadian woman to win a government scholarship for university study overseas and who went on to an illustrous career focused on women’s health—pursuing medicine and writing poetry on the side, mainly for her family to read) the feminism of the Spectator and of Mahabir himself was clear. One prominent recurring column was “Outstanding Women of India,” which featured women like Dr. Kamaladevi Chattopadhyaya, described as educated at the London School of Economics, attending international women’s conferences and participating in the civil disobedience movement of India in the 1930s (1949, 3). In this column, and in featuring the work of Indian female poets from the subcontinent, the Spectator was thus offering strong, learned, active models for Indian femininity, models who were prominent in the public sphere. The feminist thinking involved in Mahabir’s approach was also evident in his articles which called for women’s right to decide how to space out their childbearing and which praised the Amendment to the Indian Child Marriage Restraint Act raising the legal age of marriage to fifteen from fourteen for Indian girls (a modest but significant gain.) In its fervent advocacy of literacy for the three-fifths of Trinidadian Indians who were unlettered (at least in English) and especially in its push for education for girls, the Spectator and many of these small, local publications were allowing room for women’s voices and for considerations of gender which were in some ways setting the stage for the more recognized flourishing of Indo-Caribbean women’s writing that would follow in the 1990s, a history that further widens our perspective on the origin myths of Caribbean literature and reminds us of the excavating work that remains to be done, work that could reveal more of the involvement of Indo-Caribbean men in anti-patriarchal projects.

It appears that “writer” and “editor” were largely aspirational roles that were designated for Chaudhuri by Dennis Mahabir. Indeed, there were only a few articles that I could find that carried her by-line. One was about her meeting Nehru during his 1949 visit to Canada and another reflected on the pleasures of visiting the Canadian countryside. Chaudhuri’s writ- erly path was curtailed in part by her father, who exhibited both antipatriarchal tendencies, encouraging her and her sister in their pursuit of higher education, and patriarchal restrictiveness in redirecting her interest in literature and the dramatic arts to medicine and disowning her when she decided to go to India to practice as a physician rather than returning to Trinidad (personal communication with author, January 2016). Chaudhuri reprised her journal involvement later when she became editor-in-chief of the Indian Journal of Pediatrics, which was founded by her husband, Dr. K.C. Chaudhuri, in 1933. She also wrote numerous articles on pediatrics and chromosome genetics and two monographs which explore her life-long interest in Vedantic philosophy. My interviews with Chaudhuri suggest that she was creating her own version of public sphere engagement, weaving together an internationally influenced spiritual and professional identity, one that challenged certain patriarchal expectations, while at the same time conforming carefully to expectations of respectability, and later, collaborative partnership with her husband, especially in the area of children’s health in India.