Minimally Incommensurable Jahaji-bhain

Many thinkers engaging with Indo-Caribbean feminism have paid needed attention, like Pinto, to how conservatives in the Indian community respond to Indian women’s Carnival transgressions, and they have thoroughly analyzed patriarchal anxieties and their castigation of women. Here, I am less interested in resurrecting conservative voices of gendered control than in giving space to the actions of individual women who navigate through various social identities and roles in ways that illustrate self-directed attempts to control self-representation and to express recognizably communal, national, regional, and global desires as women. I thus find incommensurability valuable not only for marking opacity between groups but also for acknowledging internal differentiation. Such individuals are among the now significant numbers of Indian female Carnival revelers in mainstream Carnival, no longer seen as rebels transgressively escaping their community. With minimal incommensurability as the logic of our comparison, Guyanese, Trinidadian, local and transnational Indo- Caribbean women will be considered according to an internal “ground for comparison”: the concept of jahaji-bhain, which helps locate the specificity of Indo-Caribbean women’s collectivity vis-a-vis Afro-Caribbean women’s experiences.

Jahaji-bhain draws on ethnicity, community, and indenture. The term comes primarily from literary expressions of Indo-Caribbean feminism and echoes thus the emphasis on self-representation. As Joy Mahabir and Mariam Pirbhai (2012) point out, previous generations of Indian women demonstrated awareness and clarity about the limitations to their freedom and as a result, they made great sacrifices to financially ensure their daughters’ education and independence. Such intergenerational gendered solidarity, Mahabir and Pirbhai indicate, is demonstrative of a jahaji- bhain communal logic. Loosely meaning “ship sister,” referring to the ships on which women travelled to the Caribbean from India, the term first references women’s solidarity formed during indenture, in suffering and loss, but also expresses “a shared collective destiny fueled by deeply engrained social and cultural principles of communalism” (Mahabir and

Pirbhai 2012, 1). Women take care of themselves through this sisterhood when “protection” from the men in their community turns to physical and psychological violence. The jahaji-bhain collective, a means to feminist empowerment within the ethnic community, is the support system which then allows Indian women to resist and transgress both intra-ethnic and inter-ethnic, national, or transnational forms of gendered control and violence. Rather than willful insularity, jahaji-bhain solidarity gestures to the multiple navigations made by women who are subject to psychological, physical, sexual, and economic violence from all quarters (Mohammed 1999). Within jahaji-bhain logics, women are wresting control of how they present themselves as Indian as well as Caribbean. Jahaji-bhain is thus minimally incommensurable with the distinct historical trajectory and idioms through which Afro-Caribbean feminism emerged.

My analysis focuses on two women that I have spent time with and interviewed, but who are different in profound ways: Candace, an Indo- Trinidadian woman in her thirties who lives in Central Trinidad, and Rekha, an Indo-Guyanese woman, also in her thirties, but raised within the large Indo-Caribbean diasporic community of New York City. As these women embrace Carnival in their own ways, I argue that longstanding jahaji-bhain logics prevail for both. Even as each woman navigates through her particular social, cultural, political, and class identities (woman, Indian, Trinidadian/Guyanese, American, middle-class, etc.) often shifting the boundaries of acceptability for women in each of these categories, she holds onto her ethno-cultural community, one that has historically provided security and belonging in the often hostile post/ colonial society where Indo-Caribbeans had no clear place. Individuals who are dramatically different, Candace and Rekha are nonetheless only minimally incommensurable, in part because of their shared feminist genealogies of indenture.