Download or read book Music of Hindu Trinidad written by Helen Myers and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 546 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Like many other small towns in Trinidad, Felicity is populated almost entirely by East Indians. In their Caribbean exile, the residents of Felicity have created and recreated the music of their Hindu ancestors. Music of Hindu Trinidad is a fascinating account of the history and cultural significance of Hindu music that explores its symbolic, aesthetic, and psychological aspects while asking the larger question of how this music has contributed to the formation of identity in the midst of their great diaspora. Myers details the musical repertory of Felicity, which is based largely on north Indian genres including the traditional Bhojpuri folk songs and drumming styles brought by the first indentured laborers in 1845. In her engaging exploration of the fate of Indian classical music and new popular styles such as Hindi calypso, soca, and chutney, she even finds herself at the ancestral home of Trinidadian V. S. Naipaul in India. Copiously illustrated and accompanied by a compact disk, Music of Hindu Trinidad is a model ethnographic study.
Download or read book Music of the Indian Diaspora in Trinidad written by Laxmi Ganesh Tewari and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Includes texts of 202 songs in Bhojpuri (Devanagari) and English translation.
Download or read book Mobilizing India written by Tejaswini Niranjana and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2006-10-12 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Descendants of indentured laborers brought from India to the Caribbean between 1845 and 1917 comprise more than forty percent of Trinidad’s population today. While many Indo-Trinidadians identify themselves as Indian, what “Indian” signifies—about nationalism, gender, culture, caste, race, and religion—in the Caribbean is different from what it means on the subcontinent. Yet the ways that “Indianness” is conceived of and performed in India and in Trinidad have historically been, and remain, intimately related. Offering an innovative analysis of how ideas of Indian identity negotiated within the Indian diaspora in Trinidad affect cultural identities “back home,” Tejaswini Niranjana models a necessary project: comparative research across the global South, scholarship that decenters the “first world” West as the referent against which postcolonial subjects understand themselves and are understood by others. Niranjana draws on nineteenth-century travel narratives, anthropological and historical studies of Trinidad, Hindi film music, and the lyrics, performance, and reception of chutney-soca and calypso songs to argue that perceptions of Indian female sexuality in Trinidad have long been central to the formation and disruption of dominant narratives of nationhood, modernity, and normative sexuality in India. She illuminates debates in India about “the woman question” as they played out in the early-twentieth-century campaign against indentured servitude in the tropics. In so doing, she reveals India’s disavowal of the indentured woman—viewed as morally depraved by her forced labor in Trinidad—as central to its own anticolonial struggle. Turning to the present, Niranjana looks to Trinidad’s most dynamic site of cultural negotiation: popular music. She describes how contested ideas of Indian femininity are staged by contemporary Trinidadian musicians—male and female, of both Indian and African descent—in genres ranging from new hybrids like chutney-soca to the older but still vibrant music of Afro-Caribbean calypso.
Download or read book East Indian Music in the West Indies written by Peter Lamarche Manuel and published by Temple University Press. This book was released on with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Trinidadian sitarist, composer, and music authority, Mangal Patasar once remarked about tãn-singing, "You take a capsule from India, leave it here for a hundred years, and this is what you get." Patasar was referring to what may be the most sophisticated and distinctive art form cultivated among the one and a half million East Indians whose ancestors migrated as indentured laborers from colonial India to the West Indies between 1845 and 1917. Known in Trinidad and Guyana as "tãn-singing" or "local-classical music" and in Suriname as "baithak gãna" ("sitting music"), tãn-singing has evolved into a unique idiom, embodying the rich poetic and musical heritage brought from India as modified by a diaspora group largely cut off from its ancestral homeland. In recent decades, however, tãn-singing has been declining, regarded as quaint and crude by younger generations raised on MTV, Hindi film music, and disco. At the same time, Indo-Caribbeans have been participating in their countries' economic, political, and cultural lives to a far greater extent than previously. Accompanying this participation has been a lively cultural revival, encompassing both an enhanced assertion of Indianness and a spirit of innovative syncretism. One of the most well-known products of this process is chutney, a dynamic music and dance phenomenon that is simultaneously a folk revival and a pop hybrid. In Trinidad, it has also been the vehicle for a controversial form of female empowerment and an agent of a new, more inclusive, conception of national identity. Thus, East Indian Music in the West Indies is a portrait of a diaspora community in motion. It documents the social and cultural development of a people "without history," a people who have sometimes been dismissed as foreigners who merely perpetuate the culture of the homeland rather than becoming "truly" Caribbean. Professor Manuel shows how inaccurate this characterization is. On the one hand, in the form of tãn-singing, it examines the distinctiveness of traditional Indo-Caribbean musical culture. On the other, in the form of chutney, it examines the new assertiveness and syncretism of Indo-Caribbean popular music. Students of Indo-Caribbean music and curious world-music fans alike will be fascinated by Professor Manuel's guided tour through the complex and exciting world of Indo-Caribbean musical culture. Author note: Peter Manuel, an authority on the music of both North India and the Caribbean, is Associate Professor in the Department of Art, Music, and Philosophy at John Jay College. He is the author of several books, including Popular Musics of the Non-Western World (Oxford University Press), Cassette Culture: Popular Music and Technology in North India, and Caribbean Currents: Caribbean Music from Rumba to Reggae (Temple University Press).
Download or read book Dance Music and Cultures of Decolonisation in the Indian Diaspora written by Tina K Ramnarine and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-06-09 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dance, Music and Cultures of Decolonisation in the Indian Diaspora provides fascinating examples of dance and music projects across the Indian Diaspora to highlight that decolonisation is a creative process, as well as a historical and political one. The book analyses creative processes in decolonising projects, illustrating how dance and music across the Indian Diaspora articulate socio-political aspirations in the wake of thinkers such as Gandhi and Ambedkar. It presents a wide range of examples: post-apartheid practices and experiences in a South African dance company, contestations over national identity politics in Trinidadian music competitions, essentialist and assimilationist strategies in a British dance competition, the new musical creativity of second-generation British-Tamil performers, Indian classical dance projects of reform and British multiculturalism, feminist intercultural performances in Australia, and performance re-enactments of museum exhibits that critically examine the past. Key topics under discussion include postcolonial contestations, decolonising scholarship, dialogic pedagogies and intellectual responsibility. The book critically reflects on decolonising aims around respect, equality and the colonial past’s redress as expressed through performing arts projects. Presenting richly detailed case studies that underline the need to examine creative processes in the cultures of decolonisation, Dance, Music and Cultures of Decolonisation in the Indian Diaspora will be of great interest to scholars of South Asian Studies, Diaspora Studies, Performing Arts Studies and Anthropology. The chapters were originally published as a special issue of South Asian Diaspora.
Download or read book East Indian Music in the West Indies written by Peter Lamarche Manuel and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Trinidadian sitarist, composer, and music authority, Mangal Patasar once remarked about tãn-singing, "You take a capsule from India, leave it here for a hundred years, and this is what you get." Patasar was referring to what may be the most sophisticated and distinctive art form cultivated among the one and a half million East Indians whose ancestors migrated as indentured laborers from colonial India to the West Indies between 1845 and 1917. Known in Trinidad and Guyana as "tãn-singing" or "local-classical music" and in Suriname as "baithak gãna" ("sitting music"), tãn-singing has evolved into a unique idiom, embodying the rich poetic and musical heritage brought from India as modified by a diaspora group largely cut off from its ancestral homeland. In recent decades, however, tãn-singing has been declining, regarded as quaint and crude by younger generations raised on MTV, Hindi film music, and disco. At the same time, Indo-Caribbeans have been participating in their countries' economic, political, and cultural lives to a far greater extent than previously. Accompanying this participation has been a lively cultural revival, encompassing both an enhanced assertion of Indianness and a spirit of innovative syncretism. One of the most well-known products of this process is chutney, a dynamic music and dance phenomenon that is simultaneously a folk revival and a pop hybrid. In Trinidad, it has also been the vehicle for a controversial form of female empowerment and an agent of a new, more inclusive, conception of national identity. Thus, East Indian Music in the West Indies is a portrait of a diaspora community in motion. It documents the social and cultural development of a people "without history," a people who have sometimes been dismissed as foreigners who merely perpetuate the culture of the homeland rather than becoming "truly" Caribbean. Professor Manuel shows how inaccurate this characterization is. On the one hand, in the form of tãn-singing, it examines the distinctiveness of traditional Indo-Caribbean musical culture. On the other, in the form of chutney, it examines the new assertiveness and syncretism of Indo-Caribbean popular music. Students of Indo-Caribbean music and curious world-music fans alike will be fascinated by Professor Manuel's guided tour through the complex and exciting world of Indo-Caribbean musical culture. Author note: Peter Manuel, an authority on the music of both North India and the Caribbean, is Associate Professor in the Department of Art, Music, and Philosophy at John Jay College. He is the author of several books, including Popular Musics of the Non-Western World (Oxford University Press), Cassette Culture: Popular Music and Technology in North India, and Caribbean Currents: Caribbean Music from Rumba to Reggae (Temple University Press).
Download or read book Creating Their Own Space written by Tina K. Ramnarine and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Characterized by fast-paced, highly danceable rhythms, chutney is a fusion of traditional and contemporary Indian and Caribbean influences. In this volume Tina K. Ramnarine explores the evolution of chutney and introduces the emerging Indian-Caribbean genre into the area of scholarly discourse. Through analysis of the music, Ramnarine provides insights into social processes, effects of the diasporic settlements and ways the music operates as a symbol of Indian-Caribbean identity. This introduction of new cultural elements is a common occurrence among people transplanted to an unfamiliar geographical and cultural environment.
Download or read book Indian Diaspora in the Caribbean written by Noor Kumar Mahabir and published by . This book was released on 2009-01-01 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Introduction: an overview of Indian Diaspora in the Caribbean / Kumar Mahabir -- 1. Involuntary globalization: how Britain revived indenture and made it largely brown and East Indian (Trinidad 1806-1921) / A. Neil SookDeo -- 2. From Hindu to Presbyndu: the acculturation of the Indian in the Caribbean / Brinsley Samaroo -- 3. Migration and shifting (communal) identifications: Munshi Rahman Khan (1874-1972) / Ellen Bal & Kathinka Sinha-Kerkhoff -- 4. Indo-Guyanese diaspora within the Caribbean: migration and identity / Lomarsh Roopnarine -- 5. Race retention and culture loss: South Asians / East Indians in St. Vincent / Kumar Mahabir -- 6. Values and beliefs of Indo-Guyanese: an assessment of the assimilation hypothesis / Preethy S. Samuel and Leon C. Wilson -- 7. "I found my East Indian beauty..." : locating the Indo Trinidadian woman in Trinidadian Soca music / Kai Abi Barratt -- 8. Racial stereotypes and Indian-African relations in Grenada, 1857-1960s / Ron Sookram -- 9. The impossibility of resistance: 1970s Guyana in Oonya Kempadoo's Buxton spice / Savena Budhu -- 10. Kala Pani coolitude? East Indian subjectivity in the Caribbean / Smita Tripathi -- 11. Mothers-hyphenated imaginations: the feasts of Soparee Ke Mai and La Divina Pastora in Trinidad / Teruyuki Tsuji -- 12. The representation of Indians in the education system of Trinidad and Tobago, 1845-1980 / Sherry-Ann Singh -- 13. Balram Singh Rai: Guyana's Indian social and political reformer / Baytoram Ramharack.
Download or read book Hosay Trinidad written by Frank J. Korom and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2012-05-26 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The multivocalic rite known as Hosay in the Caribbean developed out of earlier practices originating in Iraq and Iran which diffused to Trinidad by way of South Asian indentured laborers brought to the Caribbean by the British from the mid-1800s to the early decades of the twentieth century. The rituals are important as a Shi'i religious observance, but they also are emblems of ethnic and national identity for Indo-Trinidadians. Frank Korom investigates the essential role of Hosay in the performance of multiple identities by historically and ethnographically situating the event in Middle Eastern, South Asian, and Caribbean contexts. Hosay Trinidad: Muharram Performances in an Indo-Caribbean Diaspora is the first detailed historical and ethnographic study of Islamic muharram rituals performed on the island of Trinidad. Korom's central argument is that the annual rite is a polyphonic discourse that is best understood by employing multiple levels of interpretation. On the symbolic level the observance provides esoteric meaning to a small community of Indo-Trinidadian Muslims. On another level, it is perceived to be representative of "transplanted" Indian culture as a whole. Finally, the rituals are becoming emblematic of Trinidad's polyethnic population. Addressing strategies used to resist integration and assimilation, Hosay Trinidad is engaged with theories concerning the notion of cultural creolization in the Caribbean as well as in the general study of global diasporas.
Download or read book Tales Tunes and Tassa Drums written by Peter Manuel and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2015-01-30 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Today's popular tassa drumming emerged from the fragments of transplanted Indian music traditions half-forgotten and creatively recombined, rearticulated, and elaborated into a dynamic musical genre. A uniquely Indo-Trinidadian form, tassa drumming invites exploration of how the distinctive nature of the Indian diaspora and its relationship to its ancestral homeland influenced Indo-Caribbean music culture. Music scholar Peter Manuel traces the roots of neotraditional music genres like tassa drumming to North India and reveals the ways these genres represent survivals, departures, or innovative elaborations of transplanted music forms. Drawing on ethnographic work and a rich archive of field recordings, he contemplates the music carried to Trinidad by Bhojpuri-speaking and other immigrants, including forms that died out in India but continued to thrive in the Caribbean. His reassessment of ideas of creolization, retention, and cultural survival defies suggestions that the diaspora experience inevitably leads to the loss of the original culture, while also providing avenues to broader applications for work being done in other ethnic contexts.
Download or read book East Indian Music in the West Indies written by Peter Lamarche Manuel and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Trinidadian sitarist, composer, and music authority, Mangal Patasar once remarked about tãn-singing, "You take a capsule from India, leave it here for a hundred years, and this is what you get." Patasar was referring to what may be the most sophisticated and distinctive art form cultivated among the one and a half million East Indians whose ancestors migrated as indentured laborers from colonial India to the West Indies between 1845 and 1917. Known in Trinidad and Guyana as "tãn-singing" or "local-classical music" and in Suriname as "baithak gãna" ("sitting music"), tãn-singing has evolved into a unique idiom, embodying the rich poetic and musical heritage brought from India as modified by a diaspora group largely cut off from its ancestral homeland. In recent decades, however, tãn-singing has been declining, regarded as quaint and crude by younger generations raised on MTV, Hindi film music, and disco. At the same time, Indo-Caribbeans have been participating in their countries' economic, political, and cultural lives to a far greater extent than previously. Accompanying this participation has been a lively cultural revival, encompassing both an enhanced assertion of Indianness and a spirit of innovative syncretism. One of the most well-known products of this process is chutney, a dynamic music and dance phenomenon that is simultaneously a folk revival and a pop hybrid. In Trinidad, it has also been the vehicle for a controversial form of female empowerment and an agent of a new, more inclusive, conception of national identity. Thus, East Indian Music in the West Indies is a portrait of a diaspora community in motion. It documents the social and cultural development of a people "without history," a people who have sometimes been dismissed as foreigners who merely perpetuate the culture of the homeland rather than becoming "truly" Caribbean. Professor Manuel shows how inaccurate this characterization is. On the one hand, in the form of tãn-singing, it examines the distinctiveness of traditional Indo-Caribbean musical culture. On the other, in the form of chutney, it examines the new assertiveness and syncretism of Indo-Caribbean popular music. Students of Indo-Caribbean music and curious world-music fans alike will be fascinated by Professor Manuel's guided tour through the complex and exciting world of Indo-Caribbean musical culture. Author note: Peter Manuel, an authority on the music of both North India and the Caribbean, is Associate Professor in the Department of Art, Music, and Philosophy at John Jay College. He is the author of several books, including Popular Musics of the Non-Western World (Oxford University Press), Cassette Culture: Popular Music and Technology in North India, and Caribbean Currents: Caribbean Music from Rumba to Reggae (Temple University Press).
Download or read book Trinidad Carnival written by Garth L. Green and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2007-03-28 with total page 546 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Like many Caribbean nations, Trinidad has felt the effects of globalization on its economy, politics, and expressive culture. Even Carnival, once a clandestine folk celebration, has been transformed into a major transnational festival. In Trinidad Carnival, Garth L. Green, Philip W. Scher, and an international group of scholars explore Carnival as a reflection of the nation and culture of Trinidad and Trinidadians worldwide. The nine essays cover topics such as women in Carnival, the politics and poetics of Carnival, Carnival and cultural memory, Carnival as a tourist enterprise, the steelband music of Carnival, Calypso music on the world stage, Carnival and rap, and Carnival as a global celebration. For readers interested in the history and current expression of Carnival, this volume offers a multidimensional and transnational view of Carnival as a representation of Trinidad and Caribbean culture everywhere. Contributors are Robin Balliger, Shannon Dudley, Pamela R. Franco, Patricia A. de Freitas, Ray Funk, Garth L. Green, Donald R. Hill, Lyndon Phillip, Victoria Razak, and Philip W. Scher.
Download or read book The Indian Caribbean written by Lomarsh Roopnarine and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2018-01-19 with total page 171 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2018 Gordon K. and Sybil Farrell Lewis Award for the best book in Caribbean studies from the Caribbean Studies Association This book tells a distinct story of Indians in the Caribbean--one concentrated not only on archival records and institutions, but also on the voices of the people and the ways in which they define themselves and the world around them. Through oral history and ethnography, Lomarsh Roopnarine explores previously marginalized Indians in the Caribbean and their distinct social dynamics and histories, including the French Caribbean and other islands with smaller South Asian populations. He pursues a comparative approach with inclusive themes that cut across the Caribbean. In 1833, the abolition of slavery in the British Empire led to the import of exploited South Asian indentured workers in the Caribbean. Today India bears little relevance to most of these Caribbean Indians. Yet, Caribbean Indians have developed an in-between status, shaped by South Asian customs such as religion, music, folklore, migration, new identities, and Bollywood films. They do not seem akin to Indians in India, nor are they like Caribbean Creoles, or mixed-race Caribbeans. Instead, they have merged India and the Caribbean to produce a distinct, dynamic local entity. The book does not neglect the arrival of nonindentured Indians in the Caribbean since the early 1900s. These people came to the Caribbean without an indentured contract or after indentured emancipation but have formed significant communities in Barbados, the US Virgin Islands, and Jamaica. Drawing upon over twenty-five years of research in the Caribbean and North America, Roopnarine contributes a thorough analysis of the Indo-Caribbean, among the first to look at the entire Indian diaspora across the Caribbean.
Download or read book Remembered Rhythms written by Shubha Chaudhuri and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Remembered Rhythmsexplores the role of music and cultural memory in shaping and creating diasporic identities. With contributions from leading scholars in the fields of Ethnomusicology, Cultural Studies, Sociology and Anthropology, the essays range across the musical traditions of the Indian Diaspora in Trinidad, the role of Hindi film music in the Diaspora, the music of the African and Jewish diasporas in India to more general issues at the heart of contemporary Diaspora studies. This volume is accompanied by an audio CD.
Download or read book Calypso and Other Music of Trinidad 1912 1962 written by and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2015-05-11 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Calypso, with its diverse cultural heritage, was the most significant Caribbean musical form from World War I to Trinidad and Tobago Independence in 1962. Though wildly popular in mid-1950s America, Calypso--along with other music from "the island of the hummingbird"--has been largely neglected or forgotten. This first-ever discography of the first 50 years of Trinidadian music includes all the major artists, as well as many obscure performers. Chronological entries for 78 rpm recordings give bibliographical references, periodicals, websites and the recording locations. Rare field recordings are cataloged for the first time, including East Indian and Muslim community performances and Shango and Voodoo rites. Appendices give 10-inch LP (78 rpm), 12-inch LP (33 1/3 rpm), extended play (ep) and 7-inch single (45) listings. Non-commercial field recordings, radio broadcasts and initially unissued sessions also are listed. The influence of Trinidadian music on film, and the "Calypso craze" are discussed. Audio sources are provided. Indexes list individual artists and groups, recording titles and labels.
Download or read book The Indian Diaspora written by N. Jayaram and published by SAGE. This book was released on 2004-05-24 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: N. Jayaram provides a well-presented overview of the patterns of emigration from India, highlighting the key disciplinary perspectives and strategic approaches. The study of Indian diaspora has emerged as a rich and variegated area of multidisciplinary research interest. This volume brings together nine seminal articles by well-known scholars which deal with the empirical reality of Indian diaspora and the theoretical and methodological issues raised by it. Between them they cover a variety of important aspects such as asocial adjustment, family change, religion, language, ethnicity and culture.
Download or read book Music and the Armenian Diaspora written by Sylvia Angelique Alajaji and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2015-09-07 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Survivors of the Armenian genocide of 1915 and their descendants have used music to adjust to a life in exile and counter fears of obscurity. In this nuanced and richly detailed study, Sylvia Angelique Alajaji shows how the boundaries of Armenian music and identity have been continually redrawn: from the identification of folk music with an emergent Armenian nationalism under Ottoman rule to the early postgenocide diaspora community of Armenian musicians in New York, a more self-consciously nationalist musical tradition that emerged in Armenian communities in Lebanon, and more recent clashes over music and politics in California. Alajaji offers a critical look at the complex and multilayered forces that shape identity within communities in exile, demonstrating that music is deeply enmeshed in these processes. Multimedia components available online include video and audio recordings to accompany each case study.
