In a recent interview introducing her latest historical novel, La Mémoire délavée (The Faded Memory, my translation), Mauritian author Nathacha Appanah evokes the similarities and differences between enslavement and indentureship, highlighting that the two exploitative systems treated labour, and therefore human bodies, as expendable. Although they were ‘free’, indentured Indians’ mobility was often restricted to the sugar plantation to which they were attached (Appanah 2023). 1 In addition, even though ‘whether indenture was slavery or not is ultimately [...] a matter of perspective’ (Lal 2001: 43) and the kala pani crossings were less deadly than the Atlantic slave trade (Weber 1994), the crossings were also often traumatic for those deceived by the fake promises of the recruiters, with some being kidnapped, drugged and forcibly transported. Those who did not survive the harsh conditions of the crossing were thrown overboard: 44,553 indentured labourers left India for Guadeloupe, but only 42,473 arrived on the island between 1854 and 1889 (Schnakenbourg 2005: 499, 526).
Indian indentured workers were forced to travel with few possessions and were stripped of their tangible and intangible cultural heritage. Ill-treated, controlled and at times mutilated, they nevertheless resisted the destitution to which the colonial system exposed them. This is demonstrated by the poetics of Coolitude which interrelates the crossings of the Indian Ocean and of the Atlantic and interprets the kala pani crossings themselves as a matrix that subverts the caste and class hierarchy of continental India and as the site of an unpredictable redefinition of culture and identity, in other words a site of creolization (see Carter and Torabully 2002). 2 Drawing on studies on creolization as well as on Indianité, a cultural project and critical discourse which emerged in the French Caribbean in the 1970s to valourize the Indian components of the region’s cultural diversity, 3 and on scholarship on the embodied memory of traumatic pasts, this essay proposes to analyze how the descendants of Indian indentured labourers reconstruct and transmit the heritage and memory of indenture in the archipelago of Guadeloupe through embodied performances of dance, music, songs and theatre.
Indenture and Indian cultural heritage have long been marginalized in Caribbean identity and cultural discourses, even those intended to be inclusive. 4 In the French Caribbean, owing to the small number of Indian indentured labourers and of Indo-descendants, tenuous links with India, and the need to learn Creole and then French in order to integrate into Caribbean society, the population rapidly stopped speaking Indian languages. Tamil — which in India is both a sacred and secular language — has been passed on by a few pouçaris (from Tamil pūcāri, priest), who officiate at non-Brahminic ceremonies of popular Hinduism, and by vatialous (from Tamil vāttiyār, teacher), who memorize the language to perform the nadrons, danced and sung theatre (from Tamil nādagam) which used to be staged on plantations where they gathered an inter-ethnic audience. 5 Nadrons draw inspiration from the terru kūttu village dances, a form of street theatre that accompanies Tamil worship in Tamil Nadu (Manet 2017: 27, 103–114). Cultural activists have revived the learning and teaching of Indian languages; it is the main goal of the Guadeloupean Council for the Promotion of Indian Languages (CGPLI), which has been teaching Hindi, Tamil and more recently Sanskrit (CGPLI 2009). The association has undertaken a cultural and research project to record and safeguard the nadrons practised in the French Caribbean, spearheaded by Tamil linguist and philologist Appasamy Murugaiyan. 6
Performances of Hindu epics, myths and chants recur in the works of Indo-Guadeloupean writer, politician and cultural activist Ernest Moutoussamy, a champion of Indianité and métissage in the French Caribbean, whose writings voice the challenges and opportunities presented by the inclusion of Indianité in Caribbeanness. In his tryptic novel Marianne: fée de notre République du sang-mêlé (Marianne: The Fairy of our Mixed-Blood Republic, 2018), set in the author’s native town Saint-François in Guadeloupe at the end of the nineteenth century and the turn of the twentieth century, and in his poetry collection A la recherche de l’Inde perdue (In Remembrance of Lost India, 2004), the performances of dances, mantras, songs, epics and even danced combats originating from Europe, Africa or India are the ferment of an Indo-African and Métis solidarity and fraternity. 7
Métissage (biological and cultural) is a key theme in Marianne. It is through métissage that the body of the male protagonist, the indentured Indian labourer Caloupin, who is initially marginalized by epidermal discrimination, but also by a sacralization based on the quest for purity in line with Hindu precepts, and even by a fetishization of Indian blood, is eventually placed at the heart of a creolized Caribbean identity and its cultural constructions. 8 I will demonstrate that Moutoussamy’s work challenges the marginalization of the Indian presence by imagining bodily performances of songs, dance and music from Africa and Europe that echo and respond to Indian sounds and rhythms. Such embodied performances also rally people across ethnic and racial divides and drive them to fight collectively to free themselves from colonial rule. Thus, the liberation of the body — staged during the performances — anticipates mobilization and physical resistance against the colonial system, which, within the economy of Moutoussamy’s texts, enables social, moral and even spiritual upliftment. In a last step, I will complement my literary analysis with contemporary commemorations of (post-)indenture and celebrations of Indian culture in Guadeloupe by drawing on interviews carried out with Fred Négrit, Apassamy Murugaiyan and the presidents of two Guadeloupean Indian dance associations, Om Shanti and Shakti. This allows me to highlight the complexity and paradoxes of performances of Indian song and dance in the French Caribbean, pinpointing how they oscillate between a return to an ancestral Hindu India, a recognition of the creolization at work in French Caribbean Indianness and, more recently, an opening to the global Indian culture popularized by Bollywood.
Racial stigmatization, sacralization and fetishization of the male Indian indentured body
Socio-cultural and political representations of the body are central issues in the novel Marianne, which promotes the inclusion of Indianité within métissage. The novel is divided into three sections, each adopting the point of view of a protagonist, Maba, Caloupin and Marianne. The narrative follows young Maba, a mixed-race girl of white, Amerindian and African origins, in her pursuit of her childhood sweetheart, Caloupin, the son of Indian indentured labourers ostracized from an early age because of his very dark skin colour. Maba’s prime objective is to find her long-lost friend and to have a métisse daughter with him; this daughter would symbolically bear the name of the French Republic allegorical figure — Marianne — and would therefore incarnate the mixed-raced Republic mentioned in the novel’s title.
Marianne portrays how Indian indentured labourers, and their descendants, negotiated their integration into the Caribbean society which first saw them as foreigners and accomplices of the colonists in the colonial exploitation system. Indeed, they arrived in a society where hierarchies had already been established between Europeans, Africans and Creoles. For the latter groups, the presence of Indian labourers was a hindrance to labour negotiations with the white planters who considered the Indians cheap and docile labour and pitted them against Afro-Caribbeans. In addition, the Indians’ very distinct religious and cultural beliefs made integration more difficult. By foregrounding colour-based prejudice, the novel also highlights an understudied part of the history of the indentured labourers, which is intracommunal prejudice. The Dravidian Caloupin is first rejected by the lighter-skinned Indian women from North India — commonly called Kalkata in the French Caribbean — and thus finds himself without a prospective Indian wife (Moutoussamy 2018: 119, 125). Therefore, the novel questions the racialized oppositions of Aryan/Dravidian and North/South India (though the attendant binarism Sanskrit/Tamil is not elaborated upon). Yet the narrative goes beyond the Aryan/Dravidian dichotomy as ultimately, due to his darker skin colour, Caloupin is rejected both by the Aryan Dajhani and by the Dravidian Déva (155). Epidermic prejudice is mostly interpreted as a consequence of white colonists’ politics: ‘More than ever, I realized how handicapped I was in a country where Black skin was historically weighed down by the white man, who had identified it with negativity, with nothingness, with every existential flaw’ (154). With Caloupin, the novel depicts the manifold marginalization of the body of the Indian indentured labourer, doubly stigmatized for his indentured status and his darker skin. This marginalization is what turns the male protagonist into a champion of cultural métissage which, in the novel, unfolds through performances of dance, song and music fostering Afro-Indian solidarity. 9
While métissage is a central theme of the narrative, the novel also presents a diametrically opposed perspective which consists of claiming blood purity and rejecting all forms of inter-ethnic, biological or cultural, mixing. This view is embodied by Mangalia, Caloupin’s Indian mother, who is adamantly opposed to the idea of her son marrying a non-Indian woman for fear that this would dilute his Indian blood and culture (Moutoussamy 2018: 176). Significantly, the novel also evokes purification rites in reference to Caloupin and Mangalia. For instance, it mentions the ritual bathing in and drinking of mandja/manja water/manjatani (from Tamil mañjaḷ, or curcuma longa), 10 which are performed prior to Hindu rites in the French Caribbean (Nagapin and Sulty 1989: 86–87). Mangalia is ‘soaked in her mandja water, permeated with the incense perfume of her gods’, as she performs ‘anjali’ 11 and chants ‘a mantra’ to celebrate her son’s becoming the commander of the Montplaisir plantation (Moutoussamy 2018: 173). All active participants in Hindu rituals, even dance and music performers, are expected to perform these rites before joining a ritual event, like a valsè for instance. 12 Manja is also used in a variety of ways in Hindu ceremonies, rites carried out in Hindu temples to thank the deities for a grace granted. The protagonist Caloupin also recalls drinking manja water under the guidance of the plantation’s Indian patriarch pè Géham, who built a tiny chapel to the goddess Kali, in the shade of a moulinkilè tree, where Indian labourers gather ‘with the matalom’ (137). 13
In Marianne, Hindu rites are mostly mentioned through the telling of Hindu epics or myths, the reciting of prayers, and the chanting of mantras praising an ancestral, timeless and seemingly monolithic India from which the Indian male protagonist drinks as if from an inexhaustible maternal spring:
On the bitasyon, appa, amma, aya, aka, these beings plucked from over there, also watered me with Indian sap, fertilized my ragged present with Hinduism, made me a son of the Ramayana, of the Veda. I drank the milk of an imaginary India, listened to and learned my mother’s mantras and calls to the divine. (131–132)
References to sap and milk underline a desire to root oneself in a reimagined ancestral, eternal and supposedly pure India impervious to other cultures. Milk, also described in the novel as the spiritual milk of the Vedas (137), is highly symbolical as it is commonly used in Hindu rites in the French Caribbean, including for the strictly codified cooking of rice pudding whose preparation can be set to the rhythm of the tapou (also spelt tapu). However, the presence of the Creole term bitasyon in the passage quoted above — through which the novel indicates that the plantation has in fact become a new fertile ground for the ‘plucked’ indentured Indian — already calls into question Hindu atavism which presupposes a seamless filiation with (Hindu) India, devoid of breaks, adaptations and cross-cultural fertilization, including métissage and creolization.
Although the novel celebrates métissage, biological métissage cannot offset the marginalization of the Indian indentured labourer’s body. The female protagonist, Maba, fantasizes on several occasions about her future meeting with Caloupin, including some sensual episodes that describe the intertwining of their bodies and the resulting birth of the mixed-race daughter she dreams of. But while Maba professes her love for Caloupin, it is above all her hope of mixing her blood with his that motivates her quest. So, the potential revalorization of Indianité is ousted by an objectification of the Indian male body, which appears as the target of burning desire. Throughout Moutoussamy’s writings, however, métissage comes to encompass not only this biological aspect but above all the cultural hybridity at play in the Caribbean. For the critic Edouard Glissant métissage and creolization refer to relational cultural phenomena, but they differ because the fruit of métissage may be calculated in advance while the consequences of creolization are ‘unforeseeable’, métissage ‘concentrates’ while creolization ‘diffracts’ and opens infinite possibilities (Glissant 1997: 34). In his novel, Moutoussamy complicates Glissant’s definition of métissage. In Maba’s words, métissage makes it possible to ‘go beyond, to transcend the physical, carnal nature of the phenomenon, to give it a soul, to assign it a mission of elevation, of liberation, of the conquest of moral and spiritual values’ (Moutoussamy 2018: 87–88). As indicated in this quote, métissage enables cultural contacts that can become wells of socio-political and economic progress as well as of moral and spiritual reciprocal elevation. Métissage therefore appears as a phenomenon of intercultural negotiation whose results are unpredictable; in other words, as Glissant claims, it is ‘limitless métissage’, or creolization itself (1997: 34). Moutoussamy does not use the term ‘creolization’. However, as I shall demonstrate in the following, in his texts, forms of cultural creolization take place during and through bodily performances. During these performances, whether of Indian, African or European origin, the boundaries — physical and symbolic — that kept bodies and communities apart become more porous, 14 enabling a collective inter-community galvanization of the population under colonial rule and giving back a sense of socio-economic and political agency to historically oppressed individuals.
‘L’angelus, le ka et le matalom’: Creolization of music and dance performances
Dances, songs and bodily performances of various kinds appear in the novel as moments of communal sharing, when identities and cultures meet and creolize. The novel mostly portrays Indian dances and songs in its second section, which adopts the point of view of Caloupin, who grows up on the bitasyon Malgré-Tout (Moutoussamy 2018: 114) owned by the Pauverts, infamous white ‘master[s]’ (107). 15 Some passages evoke how two male elders, vatialous pè Abo and pè Gopi, pass on Indian culture and heritage through ritual songs: ‘We sang. We rehearsed. We challenged each other. We took each other on. What a beautiful school, despite being forbidden!’ (Moutoussamy 2018: 146). The transmission of Tamil knowledge and songs takes place in secret, shortly before the Pauverts promulgate an order banning all gatherings on the plantation, thereby putting an end to the sharing of pujas and palsad that until then had brought the Indian community together (147). 16 While women cannot officiate in Hindu rituals and lead nadrons as pouçaris or vatialous do, Caloupin’s mother, Mangalia, stands out as the prime custodian and transmitter of Indian culture in the novel through the myths she tells the villagers, and, in particular, the children of the plantation. Mangalia who is both physically and symbolically stripped of her sari — she has to give up her sari for a dress, but she also displays resilience in the face of deprivation — is able to clothe her son with her songs, her prayers and her stories. 17 Cultural transmission here is not confined to intra-community relations. Instead, Mangalia’s songs bring Indians and Africans together and create an inter-ethnic fraternity on the plantation:
Every Saturday evening, she organized a meeting around our hut where, with stories of Rama, Sita, Radha, Krishna … she enchanted her audience. Using the Veda, she learned to free herself from absurd feelings, and lit the embers of fraternity around her. To the children who shared the rotti and panialon she prepared for them, she taught them to cultivate love and tolerance in their garden, where morality played an important role. With Simon, the little Black boy, Jacqueline the chabine, and the Indians, she didn’t let childhood wander between borders of bitter fruit … We were brothers and sisters in her green songs. On our foreheads of hope, she made the four cardinal points dance to the sound of the ancestral drum set to the rhythm of the ka and the matalom. (126)
Indian songs and music have a pedagogical value and a unifying virtue here. Even Mangalia, who wants to protect her son from all miscegenation, gradually changes her worldview through the songs she sings, which ‘fertilize’ interracial fraternity, as suggested by the adjective ‘green’ which is part of the extended vegetal metaphor of this excerpt. Fraternity is further highlighted through the sharing of food: the rotti and panialon which are typical dishes of Hindu rites are here shared across ethnicities. 18 Additionally, harmony and togetherness are emphasized through the lexical field of vegetation, including gardening and fruit. Gardening and working the land are central themes of this novel as colonized populations are seen to gain self-sufficiency and autonomy through the collective development of Creole gardens, and thanks to the introduction of colonage partiaire which allows them to reap part of the fruit of their hard labour in the cane fields. 19 In the above quote, however, the garden metaphorically represents the fertile ground where children from all communities can come together to grow up and develop feelings of friendship and ‘tolerance’. It is also in this way that the ‘bitter fruit’ symbolizing quarrels, disputes and conflict seem to dissolve under the musical and melodic harmony performed, and no longer represent obstacles or ‘borders’ between communities. Subtly, the text shifts from a lengthy reference to the Hindu pantheon to the combined sounds of African and Indian drums, which respond to each other.
These Afro-Indian harmonies are reminiscent of Moutoussamy’s poem ‘L’angelus, le ka et le matalom’ from the collection A la recherche de l’Inde perdue (Moutoussamy 2004: 89–91). In this poem, after a hard day’s work in the fields, a worker is comforted by ‘a wonderful music’ he hears from the threshold of his hut: ‘Fate invented a sublime melody | The sound of the church bell, the ka and the matalom | And like a divine breath caressed the mango tree’s top | And I heard the hearts of the West, Africa and India beating in unison’ (89). Music transcends the hardships of daily toil on the plantation and the attendant physical pain and exhaustion as a ‘sublime’ and ‘divine’ essence emanates from the overheard melody. The spiritual and metaphysical dimension of music is in keeping with Hindu conceptions of chanting and music as a means to bring closer deity and devotee. Moreover, the song contains political undertones as it encourages fraternal ‘unison’ in the face of colonial exploitation.
The politicization of music can also be divisive. This is highlighted by Richard Burton’s observation that music was sometimes instrumentalized by Guadeloupean independentists to promote a monolithic identity rooted in Africanity. In particular, from the 1960s onwards, independentists used Creole and gros-ka to promote an Africanist Guadeloupean identity: ‘the gros-ka, the African-derived style of drumming … is systematically opposed in much nationalist discourse to the allegedly “French,” “assimilated,” or “doudouiste” music of the biguine’; this opposition denies ‘Guadeloupe’s complex musical heritage’ (Burton 1993: 18). According to Burton, this instrumentalization also explains why, in the 1980s, Guadeloupeans of Indian origin felt the need to revive their musical culture:
It is hardly surprising that, as nationalist discourse beat the gros-ka with ever greater vigor, so many Indians would feel the need to foreground talom and matalon (East Indian drums), not (save in the case of a tiny minority) with any separatist programme in view but rather to secure their place in Guadeloupean society by underlining the East Indian contribution to its culture. (19)
In contrast, Moutoussamy’s writings present musical performances as privileged modes of cultural transmission and sharing. Music and cultural métissage are thus inseparable in these texts, where the harmonious resonance of sounds in a multi-ethnic collective space creates social and political fraternity. ‘Fraternity’ is a value dear to the writer’s heart. It is recurrent in his novels and poems, where it appears both as the ferment of cultural métissage and as its outcome. Thus, Caloupin declares: ‘I was at work to oppose Indianization to assimilation, to build a small Republic of races united by fraternity’ (Moutoussamy 2018: 149). ‘Fraternity’ echoes the French Republican motto, which Moutoussamy, who was mayor of Saint-François (1989–2008) and deputy to the National Assembly (until 2002), also praises in his political essays. He adopts and adapts this ‘fraternity’ to the island’s cultural, social and political context. The interracial harmony depicted in his texts also aims to place the Indo-Antillean at the centre of French Caribbean identity, as the Indian body’s historical marginalization from the plantation matrix in which creolization and métissage took place has had a long-term impact that is still felt today. It is therefore not surprising that the performances of dance, song and music, that galvanize populations of all cultures and ethnicities in Moutoussamy’s novel and poetry, also foster political alliances and restore the desire of subjugated populations to emancipate themselves from colonial exploitation and resist cultural and political assimilation.
Restoring agency and rootedness to the colonized body through ‘lyric iterations’ of song, dance and music
While the celebration of Hindu rites was not prohibited on plantations and the contracts of Indian indentured workers stipulated that they were entitled to four days off for the yearly celebration of Pongal, 20 restrictions were sometimes applied. In Marianne, the Pauverts, owners of multiple plantations, temporarily forbade gatherings. Festive and religious meetings thus took place in secret, in defiance of colonial prohibitions. In this sense, these times of sharing also became moments of resistance: ‘A tiny chapel made of woven coconut leaves sheltered its deity … A few Indians would parade discreetly across its threshold … It was a place of rebirth, and often, in the evening, people would meet nearby with the matalom to glorify the gods and heroes of mythology’ (Moutoussamy 2018: 137). The chapel is not just a physical structure but an embodiment of the community’s spiritual and cultural identity. The very act of constructing it from local materials — ‘coconut leaves’— signifies a physical manifestation of reverence and connection to the land. It embodies the community’s resilience, autonomy and resistance to colonial powers and demonstrates how they maintain their spiritual practices through tangible expressions. The fact that they gather on the periphery indicates that the chapel acts as a space of both marginalization and creative cultural persistence. It evokes the idea of carving out an Indo-Guadeloupean space, which is underscored by Caloupin’s desire for self-sufficiency.
The above passage is immediately followed by Caloupin’s plans for economic emancipation, as he contemplates building his own hut, ‘making the land profitable’ and ‘settling on a plot of land’ (Moutoussamy 2018: 138). A few pages later, he is the one who encourages the Indian community of the Montplaisir plantation to perpetuate their Hindu rites to resist servility and despondency:
The Indians were a servile workforce … They barely received the sound of their matalom! At my call to arms and initiative, discreetly, a small Maliémin chapel nestled in the woods under an imposing poyé tree that seemed to have been waiting for this chapel. Without delay, a puja brought together devotees who refused to deny themselves and forget India altogether … Tapu, matalom and talom rang out, calling and begging [the deities of India] to come to their children’s bedside. Tamil songs and prayers rose up in the foliage … And it was a beautiful response to the colonial will to erase everything that did not symbolize and represent the West. (144–145)
Songs are not simply a temporary outlet for the suffering endured on the plantation, but they also contribute to collective action. Thus, it is against a backdrop of musical celebration combining Creole and Tamil songs that Caloupin is acclaimed when he becomes commandeur of the Montplaisir plantation (169–170). This position could easily have isolated him from the other sugarcane workers — instead, he embodies hope: ‘We were happy and proud. In the evenings, we sang. We forgot our misery’ (169). In his new role as commandeur, Caloupin also continues to promote Afro-Indian solidarity and fraternity, and strives to revalue the labour of the land and the cane:
Labour was gradually stripped of the ugliness of the past. Stripped of its shell of servility, it became a source of freedom. We worked while we sang. Better still, we sang while we worked. Creole and Tamil refrains ensured a kind of elevation. I was heartened to finally see the two ethnic groups working together to earn their daily bread. The masters’ strategy of isolating the Indians, so that they would not be influenced by the emancipatory ideas of the Black people and Mulattos, was defeated. (170) 21
The repetition of the verb ‘stripped’ is especially subversive, as this same term is generally used in the course of the narrative to describe what the indentured labourers were deprived of. Soon after Caloupin takes over as commandeur, Indian celebrations, festivals and rituals are revived at Montplaisir: ‘Under the authority of the elders, the divali or festival of Light and the pongal — a family festival with oxen — were revived. From time to time, puja gatherings were held. The sanblanni … returned to Montplaisir’ (175). 22 The ‘battle’ waged by Caloupin ‘to deliver the cane from its curse’ and help the agricultural workers — Indians, Africans and Métis — to become self-sufficient is also undertaken in parallel by young Maba, who participates in the council of géreurs (initially made up of eighteen ‘Blancs du pays’) 23 where she ends up reuniting with Caloupin in the final section of the novel (253). Through the trajectories of Maba and Caloupin, their defence of métissage and Afro-Indian solidarity, and their promotion of a colonage partiaire that would benefit sugarcane workers, the novel closely relates the perpetuation of intercultural bodily performances to social mobilization and economic emancipation.
The bodily and kinetic performances that permeate Moutoussamy’s texts (the novel and his poems) re-root displaced bodies — both indentured labourers and former slaves — by recreating complex ‘affect-worlds’ in which multiple traditions and cultural heritages come together. In her essay ‘Affect, Body, Place’, Ananya Kabir highlights that ‘affect-worlds’ that are ‘epidermal and haptic’ and are ‘invoked through processes of embodiment’ were ‘created through the displacements and deracination that European expansionism set into mention’. These affect-worlds recur in cultural productions ‘arising out of spaces of collective trauma’. She therefore calls for the development of critical toolkits that return the body ‘to the center-stage of analysis’, arguing that ‘[t]he ways in which the work of trauma embeds the body in place, as well as the processes which have displaced it, demand attention’ (Kabir 2014: 72). Drawing on this perspective, I contend that Moutoussamy’s novel Marianne and his poetry examined here create ‘affect-worlds’ by incorporating bodily performances of dance, song and music within their texts. These embodied performances can be read as ‘lyric iterations’, that is to say poetic fragments inspired by ‘vernacular mythopoeses’, like Hindu ritual chants for instance, which repeatedly erupt in the narrative in the form of song, image, drama, poems, etc., and resist assimilation ‘into the teleology of the narrative’ (Kabir 2014: 65; see also Kabir 2005: 33). 24 Moreover, far from being monolithic, as might appear at first sight, these performances can be interpreted as ‘multidirectional’ memory practices, to use Michael Rothberg’s coinage, as they bring together, in particular, the cultural legacies of enslavement and indentureship (Rothberg 2009). They are also creolized, as evidenced, for example, by musical performances combining rhythms and sounds from Africa and India.
Nonetheless, when reading Moutoussamy’s novel, one might wonder whether the ‘magnificent ballet of mixed bloods’ (2018: 122) he praises in his novel truly reflects the reality of the time and indeed present-day reality, or whether this vision is idealistic and driven by the writer’s hopes. While it is undeniable that métissage and creolization take place in Guadeloupe and are even an object of pride for many, how does Indian culture, so intimately linked to Hinduism and, for many, to the reinvention of an ancestral (Vedic) India that no longer exists, adapt to contemporary realities and to the intermingling of peoples and cultures in the French Caribbean archipelago? To what extent is Indo-Caribbean dance and music shaped by Afro-Caribbean musical culture and how does this translate into embodied performances in Guadeloupe? To answer these questions, I turn to interviews held in 2023 and early 2024 with Tamil scholar Appasamy Murugaiyan and Guadeloupean cultural activists and performers contributing to the preservation and transmission of Indo-Guadeloupean cultural heritage, in order to examine how this culture is transmitted through public and private bodily performances.
Multifaceted Indo-Guadeloupean bodily performances
In 1975, Singaravelou observed with regard to the ‘creolization of the Indians of Guadeloupe’ that there was a ‘fixation’ of Indian identity around Hindu rites and a ‘homogenization’ of these rites inspired mainly by Tamil culture (1975: 139). More recently, a similar point was made by Murugaiyan when examining Tamil songs in the French Caribbean: ‘ritual, art and culture represent an indissociable whole and form the basis of Caribbean Tamil identity. This identity, which has been built up over a century and a half, is founded in particular on the heritage that the Tamils imported from India’ (2012: 8). These two critics underline the predominant place occupied by Hinduism in the conception of Indianité and of French Indo-Caribbean culture. On the other hand, they question the possible creolization of this culture which is based on a ‘Tamil heritage’. As creolization is a transformative process, it is opposed to the very idea of ‘fixation’ mentioned by Singaravelou. Do bodily performances — dances, songs, Indo-Caribbean theatre — confirm this fixation, or are they, on the contrary, evolving through international exchanges or/and transforming through contacts with the multiple cultures that coexist in the French Caribbean, as suggested in Moutoussamy’s conceptualization of cultural métissage?
The creolization of Indian music in Guadeloupe is illustrated by the linguistic creolization of Tamil nadrons that has occurred in the archipelago. Murugaiyan explains that Indian languages are now only practised in limited and mainly ‘sacred’ settings and that the transmission of Tamil, in particular, and to a lesser extent Hindi, is essentially oral, as part of the learning of the nadrons originally performed during Hindu rites (2012: 1–2). The vatialous act as interpreters and accompany the pouçaris. They are the first to learn and pass on the nadrons. Murugaiyan demonstrates how the orally transmitted Tamil underwent ‘creolization’ processes (2012: 4). However, the vatialou and pouçari elders, who embodied a living memory of Indo-Caribbean culture because they could not only pass on the nadrons but also recount the experiences of their ancestors on the plantations, have disappeared. In 2022, Guadeloupe lost André Perianayagom who was also known as ‘a walking encyclopedia of Indo-Guadeloupean heritage’ (Murugaiyan 2016: 155–159). Perianayagom, who grew up on a plantation and worked in cane fields, learned the nadrons orally when he was a teenager (Murugaiyan 2019: 38). He later made a handwritten transcription of the nadrons he had memorized in creolized Tamil. His passion for nadrons was also conveyed through his expressive dance steps and body language. Perianayagom was eager to pass on not only his love for Tamil songs, but also the craft and sewing techniques he used to make his own costumes — like the headdresses or narè — worn for nadron performances. Some of them were bequeathed to associations such as Om Shanti, an association which continues to make its own ornaments and props for nadrons.
Another evidence and explanation of the creolization of nadrons could be the way in which the repertoire sung was adapted in the French Caribbean. Once sung on plantations for hours on end, nadrons are now only performed for a couple of hours at most, and only selected excerpts from a few nadrons are customarily sung. Besides, nadron performances have moved from the sacred space of the chapel or the temple to the laïque public sphere and perfectly illustrate ‘how permeable the apparent divide between the sacred and the profane’ is (Benoist et al. 2004: 84). 25 As briefly mentioned earlier, nadrons can be performed for a religious ceremony, but also to welcome an Indian dignitary, during an Indian festival, for commemorations or municipal festivities where cultural associations may be called upon.
Although, as Murugaiyan points out, Tamil language has been maintained in the French Caribbean mainly in the sacred sphere and through oral transmission, Indian languages are now also taught both orally and in writing, thanks, in particular, to the work of the cultural association Guadeloupean Council for the Promotion of Indian Languages (CGPLI). The association regularly organizes workshops, events, teaching and training courses and celebrations of Indian culture and languages for the entire Guadeloupean community. In January 2024, the association’s efforts earned its president a Padma Shri award from the Indian government, attesting to the growing visibility and recognition of Indo-Guadeloupeans by mainland India (Nomel 2024). Young Indo-Guadeloupeans — whether cultural activists or religious officiants — are increasingly seeking to master the written language, in particular, to better appropriate the songs they generally learn by heart. The use of the written word is thus not solely a means of preserving a unique linguistic and cultural heritage whose elderly custodians are no longer, but also a way of emphasizing the respectability of Hindu traditions by presenting Hinduism as a ‘book religion’.
The emphasis on the written text, exemplified for instance by the teaching given by the pouçaris Jocelyn Nagapin and his son Jérôme Nagapin, reflects a desire to authenticate and authorize Indo-Guadeloupean languages and Hindu ritual practices. Their teaching relies on texts that came with Indian indentured labourers in the nineteenth century and are now preciously kept like family heirlooms, though Murugaiyan observes that they are often in poor condition (2012: 216). For the Nagapin family, the learning of songs, sacred texts and epics — the nadrons, the Mahābhārata, the Rāmāyana, the Vedas — cannot be separated from the study of written languages (Tamil and Hindi), the learning of rituals and of instrumental performance and even the local crafting of instruments, such as Indian drums, which is transmitted within the family. In Marianne, Moutoussamy goes even further, imagining that drum-making is done inter-ethnically, with an African helping an Indian to make a matalom: ‘I saw the Black man Labry helping the young Babouram to make his matalom, supplying him with goat skins, string and rings’ (Moutoussamy 2018: 175). Such cooperation might have taken place on the plantations if we consider, as Shona Jackson points out for example, that the two communities interacted despite the colonial rules aimed to keep them apart (Jackson 2012: 4).
Although Indian culture has undeniably been transformed in the French Caribbean through contact with multiple African, European and, to a lesser extent, even Amerindian influences, it remains controversial to speak of a creolization of Indianité or a creolized Indianité in a society where créolité and créole are often still associated with Africanity. Nevertheless, both Moutoussamy’s fiction and poetry, which deal primarily with biological and cultural métissage, and the interviews I carried out with cultural activists and local performers, demonstrate that Indian bodily performances, like danced and sung theatre, have a specifically Caribbean variant. Even though Indian drums are used in a highly codified Hindu religious context, Indian tempos have also now a distinct and evolving Caribbean inflexion. What is more, African sounds and music have entered Indo-Antillean ‘show music’: ‘Here, the entire Indo-Creole instrumentarium comes together, in various combinations, more or less close to the most contemporary models from India, but also from other Creole islands where there is an Indian presence’ (Benoist et al. 2004: 85–86). This proves that, contrary to popular belief, the Indian culture of the French Caribbean is not a fossilized version of a culture inherited from nineteenth-century rural India, but a living and dynamic culture open to creolization and to changes of various kinds. 26
Indeed, diversity, transformation and creativity emerge from the Guadeloupean Indian culture depicted in the interviews conducted with singers and dancers whose practices coexist and diverge just as ostensibly. A telling example of this diversity, which is directly linked to the memory of indenture, is the ‘vast “local” repertoire’ of little songs known as sillarai pāṭṭu. Composed in Tamil, they ‘relate the experiences and conditions of life on the plantations’ (Murugaiyan 2012: 35, see also Manet 2017: 117–21). Similar ‘cane working songs’ can be found across the Caribbean, but they differ on each island. Peter Manuel evokes those of Trinidad which are on the decline but might be revived through increasing access to mass media, radio, TV, etc. (Manuel 2011). Digitalization and the use of social platforms and online media might also be a way in which these songs could be safeguarded in Guadeloupe. Dance associations like Om Shanti and Shakti make increasing use of social media platforms to promote cultural events and dance courses. They have also widened the scope of courses they offer over the years: Om Shanti has diversified its classical training by adding to bharatanatyam, kathak and odissi, while Shakti has included Bollywood dances. Alongside the courses they provide, they also partake in festivals and some members join competitions at home and abroad (Nagapin and Nagapin 2023; Raghouber 2024).
Indo-Antillean culture as transmitted through the performing arts — dance, song and theatre — is therefore in constant evolution. It remains to be hoped that the links that the French Caribbean and Indo-Caribbean people are trying to develop and strengthen with mainland India do not lead to a ‘decreolization’ of Caribbean Indianité, which would in itself be an impoverishment. 27 Additionally, what is perhaps to be feared is a loss of the memory of indenture as the growing attractiveness of Bollywood culture is driving the development of show music and dance. In this sense, the fact that secondary school curricula now include, albeit timidly, this part of Guadeloupe’s history, is a welcome step forward. A systematic introduction of literary texts on indenture such as the works of Moutoussamy and other (Indo-)Caribbean authors in (French) Caribbean school curricula and university courses would also be a way of preserving and valourizing the memory of indenture and of better assessing its present-day impact on identities and cultures in the region.28