“Respectability” and “Authenticity”

Stereotypes of the purity and virtue of Indian and Indo-descent women arise at the intersection of a few discourses: (1) historical Indian Hindu nationalisms that abased indentured laborers, valorizing the virtuous women of India in contrast to untamed women in the diaspora, and (2) retaliation against this depiction and reclaiming “purity” within the diaspora, particularly through (3) religious revivals emphasizing demure femininity. The crossing of the kala pani, or black water, represented “contamination and cultural defilement” (Mehta 2004, 5) and was associated with convicts, runaways, low caste, and “loose women” who were trying to escape persecution in India (Mehta 2004; Niranjana 2011; Bahadur 2013). Religious revivalism from as early as the 1920s sought to rescue the reputation of Indian men and women in the Caribbean and to restore authenticity and respectability through the imposition of “archaic Vedic constructions of Hindu womanhood” by “traditional Hindu men and women in transplanted Hindu communities in Trinidad” (Mehta 2004, 32). The Black Power movement of the 1970s was another push to distinguish Indian identity from Black identity (Vertovec 1992, referenced by Regis 2011), solidifying the conflation of “Indian” with “Hindu” and alienating non-Hindus and creolized Indians from this conceptualization of “Indianness.”

Thus, religion and nation are two important sites for the reassembling of patriarchal authority (whether Indo or Afro-Caribbean) onto the female body, along with its inscriptions of purity, virtue, and honor (Mohammed 1998; Reddock 2008; Gopinath 2005; Niranjana 2011). The nation utilizes laws to enshrine norms of respectability as seen through the axes of race, class, and sexuality, reinforcing constructed boundaries between the acceptable and unacceptable members of each group and emphasizing the centrality of sexuality in both determining and destabilizing the status of “citizen” (Alexander 2005; Robinson 2009; Sheller 2012). Same-sex loving acts continue to be criminalized in Trinidad and Tobago (through the Sexual Offences Act, amended in 1986 and 2000) while other facets of law (domestic violence, estate law) also exclude same-sex relationships (Robinson 2009).

This chapter also considers the tension that exists between creolization and modernity. While post-indenture Indo-Caribbean men were negotiating an “Afro-Saxon model of acculturation” (Reddock 2004) in order to access respectability and reputation, Indo-Caribbean girls and women were negotiating creolization and modernity (Mohammed 1988). Citing contemporary navigations of Indian female honor vis-a-vis (white) metropolitan reputation, but not Afro-Creole models of femininity, Gabrielle Hosein (2012) suggests generational shifts in how Indo-Caribbean women construct their identities. White metropolitan ideas of reputation represent “modern” discourses apart from and contrasting the perceived conservative ideals of “Indian” femininity. I consider whether this is true for same-sex loving Indo-Trinidadian women in this study. From where do same-sex loving Indo-Trinidadian women recruit ideas about femininity and sexuality?