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Mobilizing India: Women, Music, and Migration Between India and
Trinidad
Tejaswini Niranjana
Senior Fellow
Centre for the Study of Culture
and Society in Bangalore, India
Date & Venue:
April 16th, 2007
12:00 pm - 1:30 pm
Center for the Advanced Study of India, 3600 Market St, Suite 560
Philadelphia
Please RSVP in advance by email,
fax (215.573.2595) or telephone (215.746.3159).
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Dr.
Niranjana will discuss her most recent book Mobilizing
India. Descendants of Indian indentured laborers
to the Caribbean comprise more than forty percent
of Trinidad's population. 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, but are intimately
related. Drawing on a variety of historical and
contemporary materials, Dr. Niranjana argues 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. 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.
Dr.
Niranjana is the author of Siting Translation:
History, Post-Structuralism, and the Colonial
Context and a coeditor of Interrogating
Modernity: Culture and Colonialism in India.
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