1On March 16, 2009, Lloyd King, a former professor at the University of the West Indies at St. Augustine, wrote a letter to the Express newspaper of Trinidad and Tobago entitled, ‘What’s the “Good Life” for us’? It was in response to a discussion on a local television station that asserted that Afro-Trinidadians, by and large, are not interested in business ‘except as employees, while Indo-Trinis and Syrians, Chinese and white creoles take to it like ducks to water’. He noted that Selwyn Ryan, another former professor at the University of the West Indies, had been commissioned by the University of Trinidad and Tobago to do a study on the entrepreneurial abilities of Afro-Trinbagonians, particularly after the end of British slavery and averred:

I am certain he will find that its link with moral and spiritual values is curious. Since at least the nineteenth century, John Stuart Mill was denouncing the English obsession with commercial success which has been connected to the moral and spiritual values of Puritanism—that material success was/is a sign of spiritual worth. Interestingly, the same applies to Hinduism. As I have pointed out elsewhere, this was an important factor in the drive which led V.S. Naipaul to write A House for Mr Biswas. Naipaul was vindicating his Hindu father who was a commercial failure. How different it is in an Earl Lovelace novel where a character may live in a shack and refuse to pay rent or a man may refuse to nail down his roofing because Government owes him compensation for slavery. Inner worth is the issue. The literature offers different clues as to differences in mentalities. What indeed is the ‘good life’?

2Whether one agrees with Professor King’s reading of Naipaul or Lovelace, it is clear that the ruminations of our writers, in this case of the two most prominent writers of the society, still offer gauge of how/what our people think and a marker of their activities in what has now become their home. A close look at Trinidad and Tobago literature shows us how a people conceived of themselves in a new world.

3When the East Indian indentures (and the Africans) came to the diaspora (we are concerned here about Trinidad and Tobago), they brought with them their own ways of seeing the world, their various religious texts, their drama, and other aspects of their literary heritage. The Hindus brought their Holy texts (the Ramayana and the Bhagwat Gita), their folktales (kheesas), and their folk wisdom (kahanis) whereas the Muslims brought the Koran; their hosay (that is, the Shiites), a passion play that re-enacted their death of Hussain and Hossein; a theatrical form that was analogous to the ramleelas, and the calypso/carnival that Africans brought with them from West Africa. When the Indians arrived in these foreign lands, they used their literary and religious forms to come to terms with the social environment they encountered.

4The East Indians arrived in Trinidad in 1845. By 1865 there were approximately 25,000 to 30,000 East Indians on the Island of which about 85 percent were Hindus. Even the different language-speaking groups within the East Indian community had different responses to and accommodated themselves differently to their new environment. Yet, by and large, they kept their culture and adhered to the teaching and preaching of their epics. In 1866 Daniel Hart observed that ‘after work, the [Hindu] men sit for hours in circles listening to some story’ (101). Presumably, he was referring to the Ramayana. In his Guide to Trinidad (1888), notwithstanding his Eurocentric biases, J. H. Collens observed:

The philosophy of our coolies in this colony is substantially that which their forefathers adopted some 2,500 years ago in the philosophic age; their theology, or rather mythology, is that of the Puranas [a group of important Hindu texts] of much more modern date. It must be acknowledged that the Puranas are a mass of contradiction, extravagance, and idolatry, though couched in highly poetical language. It is, nevertheless, astonishing how familiar the Trinidadian coolies are with them; even amongst the humblest labourers who till our fields there is a considerable knowledge of them, and you may often in the evening, work being done, see and hear a group of coolies crouching down in a semicircle, chanting whole stanzas of the epic poems, Ramayan, etc. (233)

5Of the three holy texts that the Hindus brought to Trinidad, the Ramayana had the greatest impact on shaping their literary consciousness. In its original form, the narrative was told over forty days and covered the period from ‘Rama’s birth to his coronation, and would be addressed to an audience numbering anywhere from a couple of hundred thousands, each installment of the narration occupying no less than three hours’ (Narayan 1972: 171). Hindus throughout India performed and read from his work, and those who came to Trinidad were intimately aware of and connected to the precepts of the Ramayana that they practiced in their daily lives. The Ramayana was recited as well as sung.

6 In 1985 when I introduced Kumar Mahabir’s The Still Cry: Personal Accounts of East Indians in Trinidad and Tobago during Indentureship (1845-1917), I made the following observation:

The attempt of a people to cast their reality in the form of myths, symbols, metaphors and so on is grounded in the structures of a people’s encounter with their world and represents ‘their attempt to impose a satisfactory, graspable humanizing shape upon it’…. Indeed, the attempt to render one’s world in a poetic or poeticized form—a kind of poeticalness, as it were—is consistent with a people’s attempt to impose structure and meaning upon that world and the desire make it meaningful and explicable.

7It is clear that the Hindus adopted the lessons from these texts to serve their new interest in their new home.

8The East Indians in Trinidad performed the ramleelas (the story of Ram), an open air enactment of the Ramayana that they brought from the United Provinces where we are told it was ‘the greatest festival in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries’ (Jha 1985: 2). Jagessar Ganesh, president of the Dow Village Ramleela Cultural Organization, whom I interviewed in 1992, says that ramleela was first celebrated in Dow Village in 1880. This would have been the time that Collens spoke about. Ganesh noted that ‘since then this religious play has continued in this village until today…. This is the only Ram-leela ground that has performed the Ram-leela continuously since 1880’. Adapted to its Trinidad environment, the ramleela was performed over a period of ten to twelve days and lasted about four hours each evening. Performed by amateur actors, the story involved the entire community and thereby provided a sense of continuity, solidarity, and solace in a strange world. Each villager could tell what episode would be performed on which given night. Both Hindus and Muslims took part in this drama as both Hindus and Muslims and Africans took part in the Hosay.

9 At Felicity, another village in which the ramleela was held since the beginning of the 20^th century, the play was broken up into the following episode: Introduction to the Ramayana; The Conception; Viswaaitra Seeks Assistance of Rama; The Bringing of Lord Shiva’s Bow and Wedding Ceremony; Proposed Coronation and Eventual Exile; the Soorpanakha Episode; the Kidnapping of Sita; The Burning of Lanka; The Burning of the Bridge to Lanka; The Defeat of Raavan; Raam, Bharat, and Milaap. It was his viewing of a performance of the ramleela at Felicity that led Derek Walcott to rapturous delight when he addressed his fellow Nobel laureates:

Deities were entering the field. What we generally call ‘Indian music’ was blaring from the open platformed shed from which the epic would be narrated. Costumed actors were arriving. Princes and gods, I supposed. What an unfortunate confession! ‘Gods, I suppose’ is the shrug that embodies our African and Asian diasporas. I had often thought of but never seen Ramleela, and had never seen this theatre, an open field, with village children as warriors, princes, and gods. I had no idea what the epic story was, who its hero was, what enemies he fought, yet I had recently adapted the Odyssey for a theatre in England, presuming that the audience knew the trials of Odysseus, hero of another, Asia Minor epic, while nobody in Trinidad knew any more than I did about Rama, Kali, Shiva, Vishnu, apart from the Indians, a phrase I use pervertedly because that is the kind of remark you can still hear in Trinidad: ‘apart from the Indians’. (Walcott 1992)

10Walcott captured the beauty of this dramatic story in his Nobel Lecture as he meditated on ‘the sacred celebration of joy, the rehearsal of collective memory, that is the very essence of human experience, beyond history‘ (Walcott 1992). It was just one mode of Indian literature in one small part of the diaspora. It was a story that would be told and retold on evenings when the Indians were taught the exploits of Rama or Krishna and the Pandavas of the Mahabharata. The morality that was extracted from these tales would guide their footsteps in this new land.

11 While the Hindus were performing their rituals and their literature in their new land, the Muslims, too, were trying to find a space to worship their gods through the practice of their own dramas. Although there was not a script as such, the hosay was another manifestation of the performative in the East Indian lives in Trinidad and Tobago. Although it is generally believed that the first observance of hosay took place in 1854, just about nine years after the East Indians arrived, one of the decisive moments in its evolution occurred in 1871 when the editors of the Trinidad Chronicle published verbatim, a letter that the Indians addressed to Sir James Longden, governor of the island. It read:

We Coolies have combined of perinforming you that as our FETE DAY is rapidly approaching, we shall indeed be exceedingly joyous of beholding everything clear before us for the same purpose. Example. As there are varieties of Nations as well as Sexes, there are also a great diversification in their rites and ceremonies. For instance, take the first for granted: the English takes a great delight in attending to his Church, for he believes it pleaseth his God; in like manner the Pagan, by praying his homage to his God Hosa, he also believes it pleaseth the same God. Hence we deem it necessary to strive all efforts of avoiding obstacles, which withstands or deters us from perpetrating that homage which is a tribute to God.
Before delaying so long a time in expressing our wishes, we shall now in few words express it, and they are as follows:
This year, Sir, there will be a great obstacle withstanding our paths, consequently, our Hosaes will be rendered impassable on account of the ‘Telegraphic wire’.
We do not wish to the wires remove at several places, on the opposition (i.e., on the contrary)—but there is a essential passage, in which partly all the Hosaes are compelled to pass, for the purpose of executing their decisions, and that spot is San Fernando.

12Whether the editors liked their grammar or not, the Indians had made their point. They placed their argument in the context of civilization and demanded that their rights, like those of the whites, be respected. They affirmed they possessed similar civilized impulses as their white brethren. However, the editors could not help but give the writers a good tongue-lashing. Although they conceded that the Indians possessed certain rights, they advised that ‘in a free country like this, a man is free to commit many follies, but he must neither make free with his own life, nor injure his neighbor in person or goods; nor must the public convenience suffer for the fancy or freak of individuals.’ Since the wire was removed for planting interest, it was correct to move it for ‘the coolie labourers on the occasion of their great fete’. Yet, the newspaper could not disguise its disdain for this heathen practice. It asked:

Who in the name of mystery was Hosay? And how come there be two Hosays, a hindoo and a mussulman Hosay; as some say there are? And what is the proper Hosay fete day, in the Christian calendar? For it seems to wander from April to June, and even later. How is the anniversary computed? We speak of the Hindu Hosay. Does the Mussulman’s Hosay always correspond with the Hindoo one? Is Hosay a synonyne of Krishna, the Appolo and Antinous…. Why is the only hindu fete day consecrated to this ‘unknown god’ while of the better known we hear naught? Why is the richly begilt, many-storied ark thrown, with its mystic contents, at the end of the ceremony, into the Gulf? And what do these things typify? Can anyone, in decent English, instruct us benighted Christians, as to the meaning of these curious matters? (Trinidad Chronicle, March 28, 1871)

13The editors were being facetious and, as the last sentence of their inquiry suggests, they were also contemptuous of the Indian practices. It took another white man, John Morton, a Canadian missionary stationed in Trinidad to answer them.

14‘Playing hosay’, that is, the Indian street procession—became widespread in the 1870s and assumed its place in the evolving Creole society. Although it represented a funeral procession initially, it also signified how a community interiorized a tradition and made it a basis for its hopes and aspirations. In other words, the Muslim community was using its religion to construct a new life in a strange land. For the Shiites the tragic death of Husayn had ‘become for the Shii Muslims a cosmic event touching all of human history, nature, [and] the entire universe. Husayan martyrdom, moreover was integrated very early into the history of revelation, more specifically into the traditions of the ancient biblical prophets and the Christ of the Gospel’ (Ayoub 1978: 136). Therefore, when Combination asked that their religious preference be placed on the same footing as that of their Christian counterparts, they were asking that their humanity be given the same respect as that which was given to the humanity of the Europeans. Whereas the English took ‘great delight in attending to his Church, for he believes it pleaseth God’, the mussulman took great delight in worshipping Allah by commemorating the martyrdom of Husayn, ‘regarded by the Shi-I community as the cosmic event around which the entire history of the world, prior as well as subsequent to it, revolves’ (Ayoub 1978: 141).

15The literary-theatrical aspect of this festival was also important to the Muslim community. As practiced by its adherents, hosay, a passion play, was analogous in many ways to the ramleela and carnival. Fred Halliday writes that the hosay (he spells it ‘hoosai’) represented ‘the theme of martyrdom and sacrifice, celebrated every year in the passion plays of commemorating the death of the Shi’ite leader Hussein in the seventh century’ (60). By the tenth Islamic century (fifteenth century A.D.), the hosay procession ‘began to evolve in the familiar passion play, or what may be more accurately termed the representation (shabih) of the entire battle of Karbala, with people playing various roles of its major characters’ (Ayoub 1978: 155). Like carnival and the ramleela, hosay was nothing less than theatre in the street, a display of bodily expression as a people enacted their histories in their place and in their time. It was ‘the only occasion on which Indians from different plantations came together once a year’ (Moore 1995: 177). By the end of 1870, ‘different bands of Hose’ celebrators’ (‘The Coolie Hosea’, Fair Play, November 23, 1882) and many Africans and Hindus began to take part in what the authorities called ‘heathen’ celebrations.

16In 1875 Fair Play reported that the Hosay, held annually, was celebrated with

greater éclat than ever, judged from the number of showily decorated temples [taziyas], which they paraded about our streets yesterday. At one time we counted a procession of thirteen of them, proceeded by music of a tambourine-drum kind, and attended by crowds of Coolies…. A curious proof of the importance of our Coolie population, now, is that, whilst estates were comparatively at standstill, our stores closed early, there being nothing to do, as the Coolies were holiday-making. (Fair Play, February 18, 1875)

17In a much more charitable report, Fair Play reported that the ‘in Marine Square and various other parts, members were seen gathered round their singers and sword-stick players. But the largest crowds attended the various temples, which they constructed with so much taste and elegance. There must have been at least 45 of these parading about town’ (Fair Play, January 15, 1878).

18At the end of the nineteenth century, hosay was playing the same role that carnival and the ramleela was playing for the Africans and the Hindus respectively. To draw on Paul Gilroy, black bodies were being celebrated as instruments of pleasure and devotion rather than instruments of labour in a public space they carved out for recovery and recuperation. Combination understood only too well: each nation has its rites and ceremonies. These Muslim-Trinidadians, with some help from Africans and Hindu-Trinidadians, simply expressed their dark-skinned selves in a strange land.

19All of these festivals could be considered aspects of open air theatre. In contradistinction to Aristotle’s argument that plot, character, thought, diction, spectacle and song should be central to the dramatic performances, in these Asian and African dramas—carnival, calypso, and hosay—song, spectacle, music, and dance took precedence over plot, character, thought, and diction. Where Aristotle saw song and spectacle as mere embellishments and emotional attractions as consisting of secondary importance, for Africans and Asians these elements were central to the dramatic performance. These dramas were outward looking, participatory forms rather ’the spectatorial‘ aspects of cultural forms that one finds in English society. Forced to assert themselves in a new land, these people recouped aspects of their culture that were forced underground during the early period of indentureship. Needless to say, this period of cultural self-assertion—that is, in the last quarter of the nineteenth century—was matched by corresponding demands for greater political self-control and autonomy.

20Against such a background, it is understandable why Professor King would look to Naipaul and Lovelace to ascertain significance of Hindu and African values in shaping the responses of its respective people in the diaspora. I am not too sure what Professor King means when he says that Naipaul was vindicating his Hindu father who was a commercial failure when he wrote A House for Mr. Biswas. I can only reiterate what I wrote in another context and that is A House for Mr. Biswas is merely a retelling of Ramayana in a New World context. Mr. Biswas’ tragedy consisted in his having to reconcile new world aspirations with old world formulations. Naipaul is able to manipulate the epic form to illustrate themes he introduced in The Mystic Masseur and The Suffrage of Elvira. It also allows him to examine the Hindu concept of self and the nature of self-realization. Moreover, the contradictions that inhere in Mr. Biswas’ life reflect the changing conditions of a people that is caught up in the transition from feudalism to colonial-capitalism world order.

21 One can argue that Naipaul distorts the Ramayana to express his new historical reality. More important, the unity of the old epic which tells of the noble lives of Rama and Sita must be destabilized to capture the disunity of the new world and the apparent helplessness of a man and his wife caught up in the ambiguity of a new social situation. Paralleling the story of the Ramayana, A House for Mr. Biswas tells the story of a colonial man who has been banished from his homeland and destined to wander in the wilderness of Trinidad. Thus, he is caught up in a drama of exile and alienation.

22A brief comparison of the texts makes the point. When the Ramayana opens, the reader meets Dasa-ratha, the great king of Kosalas, who lives in the city of Ayodhya, the ideal seat of righteousness and who is celebrated for his noble deeds and just actions. In this orderly society, each person knows his rank and, with blissful acceptance and obedience, follows his varna faithfully. In due course, four sons are born to the three wives of Dasa-ratha. Of all the sons, Rama becomes the idol of his father and much beloved by all his people. Because Rama has a tremendous sense of duty towards his father, care for his mother, faith and respect for the gods, and the love of the people of Ayodhya, Dasa-ratha names him heir-apparent to this throne. The good news brings much rejoicing, but as preparations are being made for the coronation celebration, dark intrigue follows, which leads to the exile of Rama, Sita, and Lakshman into the forest.

23Ram accepts his fate calmly. Neither grief nor anger touches his heart and, in obedience to his father’s will, he prepares for his lonely exile in the cold of Dankar’s forest. The loyal people of Ayodhya, on hearning of Rama’s exile, follow him to the banks of the Tamasa River, and Rama, Sita, and Lakshman go to the hermitage of Bharadvaja, where they stay for a while. For fourteen years Rama wanders in the forest, fulfilling the work of his father to which he had committed himself. Upon his return to Ayodhya, Rama is greeted by his people and his brother Bhrat, who reigned in his absence. Placing the ‘jeweled sandals’, symbol of kingship, at Rama’s feet, Bharat humbly returns the kingdom to his brother.

24The parallels between the Ramayana and A House for Mr. Biswas are clear. In the Ramayana the concepts of fate (karma) and duty (dharma) are paramount. Unlike Rama who becomes the symbol of his people’s aspirations, Mr. Biswas rejects his duties of allegiance and obedience to his parents and his people. Unlike Rama, who becomes the symbol of his people’s aspirations, Mr. Biswas is the cause of his father’s death and the disruption of the family into which he marries. He has not fulfilled his duty towards his mother to whom he has formed no solid ties. In the non-performance of his duty to his mother, he has committed one of the most heinous crimes in his culture and therefore deserves to be punished by the gods.

25In contrast to Mr. Biswas, Rama is resolute, noble, dutiful, respectful, and concerned about his elders, particularly his parents. Rama is the eldest son and pride of the Raghu line while Mr. Biswas is the youngest son of Raghu and bane of his line. Whereas Rama could boast proudly that he is ‘duteous to my father’s bidding, duteous to my mother’s will, / Striving in the cause of virtue in the woods we wander still’ (The Ramayana, 7), Mr. Biswas is estranged from his mother and feels no grief when she dies. All he can do is bewail his loneness and exile and pontificates about the futility of his life and the boredom his exile in the Wilderness has brought him. Because he has not fulfilled his dharma (the duty and morality that befits his caste) and his own dharma (his personal morality and duty) towards his mother and his kind, his karma becomes predictable and inevitable. He is condemned to a life of death and damnation. An anti-hero, Mr. Biswas is condemned to wander in an alien land, unable to realize himself. In the process, he develops a self that is staunchly rooted in his world that is a product of his history and his place.

26 This is not to suggest that the sacred texts of the Hindus affected East Indian indentures in the same way. By way of contrast, Lakshmi Persaud demonstrates the positive manner in which the Ramayana and the Mahabharata affected her life. In her case, she realized that her mother had taken the materials from the many stories of those two great books and ‘with a sculptor’s chisel shaped them to her own liking. It was always done with the affection of a mothering trying to impart a deeper wisdom to her naïve, fast growing daughter’ (99). Thus, she proudly proclaims: ‘My understanding of morality was formed—by the interpretation of the Ramayana by my mother and by my father and the pundit and others’ (101). It might be argued by remaining true to the teachings of the great epics she became well favored by the gods and therefore went on to have a much more balanced relationship between the old world her parents knew and the demands of the new world in which she found herself.

27The ancient texts of India gave shape to and re-focused the lives of Indians in the Wilderness. Both the Hindus and Muslims drew on their literary and religious texts to plant themselves in their new space and to come to terms with the demands of their new environment. Any assessment of their positioning themselves in their new world must take into consideration the spiritual culture they brought with them when they arrived. Perhaps, as Walcott recognized, these enactments of memory may not have been so much a distortion but an abridgment of an original representation or memory. Thus, although one may not be inclined to accept everything that Professor King says, it certainly remains true that a study of the literature of East Indians in Trinidad and Tobago offers several clues about what is important to them and why they see the world in the ways that they see it.