In 2006 a set of scholars collaborated with performers and activists to curate twenty-one performances in India by three troupes representing very distinct sorts of India-related diasporic communities. One group consisted of Indo-Trinidadians specializing in the light, contemporary pop music called chutney. Another was comprised of Sidis, primarily of Gujarat, who are descendants of East Africans who came, under various circumstances, to western India as many as five centuries ago. The third group represented the music of Bene-Israel Jews, whose community was established in western India some two thousand years ago, but has dwindled in recent decades due to emigration to Israel. In conjunction with these performances, a conference was held in New Delhi in which the curating scholars, together with other interested specialists, met to present papers and reflect on their experiences and findings, and on how these might collectively illuminate aspects of diasporic dynamics. Remembered Rhythms, co-published by the sponsoring Archives and Research Centre for Ethnomusicology (ARCE), is the documentary product of this conference. It contains written (and longer) versions of the papers, edited transcripts of the subsequent discussions, and also a CD of songs by the groups, and other relevant items. Some of the papers recapitulate material found in monographs by the presenters (especially Niranjana 2006, Myers 1999). However, their collective presence in this attractively produced volume, enriched with often stimulating commentaries, make this book a useful addition to the ever-growing literature on diasporic cultures.
An opening essay by Frank Korom and the subsequent discussion explore, among other things, how the diverse nature of the communities involved problematizes any simple conception of how the notion of diaspora should be interpreted. Since that term is generally used to connote a once-displaced population that retains (or develops) a self-awareness and an affective sense of belonging to an ancestral homeland, questions emerge about its applicability to dispersed peoples like the Sidis, most of whom have been unaware of their African ancestry. The remarkable activities of Amy Catlin-Jairazbhoy and the late Nazir Jairazbhoy have done much to contribute to a new sense of community and self-valorization among the Sidis, while also illustrating the potential role of scholars and activists in stimulating diasporic consciousness. In their papers, Catlin-Jairazbhoy and Jean-Pierre Angenot shed further light on the Sidis, their music, and the results of their activities.
Three papers explore aspects of Indo-Trinidadian music and culture. Helen Myers discusses her research on Bhojpuri women’s folksongs performed—though now far less often—in Trinidad; Tejaswini Niranjana focuses on the impact of Hindi films in that country; and Tina Ramnarine offers perspectives on aspects of retention, hybridity, and other dynamics in Indo-Trinidadian music culture, including the enigmatic metal instrument, the dental, which seems to exist more in the diaspora—including Fiji as well as the Indic Caribbean—than in India itself. (I provide fuller documentation regarding this curiosity, as well as extensive exploration of the related general dynamics of persistence, creation, and creolization in my book Tales, Tunes, and Tassa Drums [2015].) The subsequent discussion further explores—one might dare say belabors—ambiguities attending the notions of hybridity and syncretism.
Finally, Esther David and Sara Manasseh offer articles on the Jewish communities of India, now largely relocated to Israel; Manassah focuses on the significance of 78 rpm records made by members of these communities in the decades before 1945.
Special appreciation is due to the energy and inspiration with which ARCE director Shubha Chaudhuri and scholars Catlin-Jairazbhoy and Myers assembled performing troupes and arranged programs for them. Particularly notable is how the Sidis, under Catlin-Jairazbhoy’s guidance, performed successfully in the West, entertaining audiences with their animated, exciting, and utterly distinctive secular and sacred music traditions. In New York, I had the pleasure of helping facilitate a joint concert of Indo-Guyanese singers of chowtal (a North Indian-derived folksong genre, preserved quite faithfully and vigorously in the diaspora) with Indo-Fijian singers of the same tradition, who had relocated to California.
Even as the actual origins of diasporas recede further into time, new links continue to be made between long-separated communities. Various events have reunited Afro-Cuban performers of West African-derived songs and incantations with their long-lost counterparts in Nigeria, Sierra Leone, and elsewhere; and in New York, “Madrasi” Indo-Guyanese of South Indian rural origins have cultivated new affective links with Tamil counterparts in India via the Internet and personal interactions at Hindu temples and other sites (Jackson 2016). Such encounters—whether precipitated by scholars or community members themselves—do far more than “reveal” diasporic connections; instead they create new forms of diasporic consciousness, with their own attendant contradictions, conflicts, and, in some cases, mystifications. They also call for further study, and Remembered Rhythms provides a fine model for how such research can integrate scholarship with performance and activism.
Works Cited
Jackson, Stephanie. “From Stigma to Shakti: The Politics of Indo-Guyanese Women’s Trance and the Transformative Potentials of Ecstatic Goddess Worship in New York City.” In Indo-Caribbean Feminist Thought: Genealogies, Theories, Enactments. Edited by Gabrielle Jamela Hosein and Lisa Outar, 301-320. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2016.
Manuel, Peter. Tales, Tunes, and Tassa Drums: Retention and Invention in Indo-Caribbean Music. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015.
Myers, Helen. Music of Hindu Trinidad: Songs from the Indian Diaspora. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.
Niranjana, Tejaswini. Mobilizing India: Women, Music, and Migration between India and Trinidad. Raleigh-Durham: Duke University Press, 2006.
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[Review length: 880 words • Review posted on December 5, 2017]