What is the difference between west indian and east indian

What role does India play in the Indo-Trinidadian imagination? How much contact is there between India and the Indo-Trinidadian community? Has there been travel and exchange in both directions? India plays a large role in the Indo-Trinidadian imagination. While Indo-Trinidadians insist on their commitment and loyalty to the nation of Trinidad and Tobago, they also express pride in their Indian ancestry. They don't see these two identities as necessarily in contradiction.

Identification with India heightened in the s when the independence movement in India added vigor to the Indo-Trinidadian consciousness. As early as the s, young Indo-Trinidadian intellectuals began staging island-wide demonstrations in support of India's demand for freedom. Public meetings held in Indo-Trinidadian majority areas opened and closed with Indian patriotic songs and "Vande Matram," the Indian national anthem.

Many of the Indo-Trinidadian organizations formed during this period, like the India Club, were intent on spreading knowledge about India and things Indian. Wealthy Indo-Trinidadians visited India and contributed generously to famine relief funds. Visits from a host of Indian missionaries and cultural leaders generated new interest, especially among the Indo-Trinidadian middle class, in the language and culture of their "mother country.

Contact with India continues today and India as imaginary homeland has much symbolic import for Indo-Trinidadians. Yet, most Indo-Trinidadians will emphatically insist on their Trinidadian identity. While the wider society tends to view Indo-Trinidadian identification with India as a statement of disloyalty to the nation of Trinidad, Indo-Trinidadians see it differently.

They insist they can be Indian and Trinidadian at the same time. My book explores why Indian and Trinidadian identities have historically developed as mutually exclusive identities, and the strategies through which Indo-Trinidadian cultural activists attempt to redefine Trinidadian national identity to include Indian elements.

The Indo-Trinidadian dilemma of being viewed as strangers or outsiders in their society of settlement because of their ancestral culture is quite typical of how immigrant Asians are viewed generally.

Asians, as in the United States, are often viewed by other groups as unassimilables or as perpetual strangers because of the unusually heavy cultural baggage imputed to them. Can you discuss the process of creolization? In your book you argue that Indo-Trinidadians themselves are a product of creolization rather than inheritors of a strict ancestral culture. Can you explain this? A combination of the Spanish words "criar" to create, to imagine and "colon" a colonist, a founder, a settler , the term Creole in the British Caribbean refers to people and things that constitute a mix of elements originating in the Old World.

Through this mix of Old World forms, cultures and people indigenous to the New World were created. The terms creole and creolization, however, emphasize primarily the synthesis of African and European Old World elements, thereby excluding Indians.

Thus while those with African and European ancestry are labeled Creoles, Indo-Trinidadians are never considered to be Creole. The implications of this exclusion from creole status is significant for Indo-Trinidadians. Creolization also implied indigenization whereby foreign elements could become native to the New World through creative mixings. East Indians who were considered unmixables because they were thought to be so saturated with an ancient albeit inferior civilization, were as a consequence not accorded Creole or native status in Trinidad.

Thus, Indo-Trinidadians have been symbolically positioned as outside of the nation of Trinidad before and since independence in My book examines the material and ideological mechanisms through which Indo-Trinidadians were positioned outside the creolization process and thereby the Trinidad nation. By examining Indo-Trinidadian practices and behaviors, I argue that Indo-Trinidadians too can be considered creole because they are active creators of new cultural forms indigenous to the New World rather than being mere reproducers of ancestral cultural forms.

What historical factors contributed to the development of the Indo-Trinidadian community as distinct and isolated from the larger Trinidadian population? Historically a host of factors functioned to situate East Indians as separate from the rest of Creole society. Soon after arrival in Trinidad, Indian indentured laborers were banished to the sugar estates concentrated in the flatland or rolling hills of the western side of the island, later known as the sugar belt, thereby subjecting them to spatial isolation.

As indentured laborers they were legally differentiated from the rest of the population and were subject to a number of laws that restricted their mobility and hence their contact with the wider society. Occupationally too, they were confined to the cultivation and processing of cane. Thus the majority of East Indians were confined to the rural agricultural sector. Religious and cultural differences coupled with their inability to speak English, underscored their alienation from the rest of the population.

Symbolically too, East Indians were represented as outsiders. Since the Indian presence was thought to be only temporary, very little effort was made by the colonial government to integrate East Indians into the rest of society.

Even education functioned to separate East Indians. How does colonial race theory inform contemporary politics on the island? First, indentured laborers were never considered property; their humanity was never in question. However, the working and living conditions of indentured labor were often comparable to those of slaves.

Moreover, several features of the indentured contract system combined to make the Indians captive labor: the legal obligation to work, the promotion of indebtedness through unmeetable workloads, and the requirement that they fulfill the purposes of the employer during the period of indentureship in order to secure their freedom. Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF. Skip to main content. This service is more advanced with JavaScript available. Advertisement Hide. Authors Authors and affiliations Shalini Puri.

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