32. INDIA IN THE CARIBBEAN

How the Indian communities acclimatised to their new realities

A WAY OF LIVING

Once they landed and had been allocated to the various estates, they were housed in what, in many instances, were the ‘Negro quarters’. The estates were mandated to provide certain basic food rations: for the first twelve months, a daily adult allocation of 1 ½lbs of rice or 2lbs of ground maize or 2 ½ lbs tanias or yams cooked or equivalent or other vegetables as determined by the Agent General of Immigration. 1/2lb salt-fish or salt meat or dried meat uncooked and 1oz coconut oil. Every child above the age of six and under ten, half the above. (That seems like a lot of food as a daily ration, but who am I to judge the accuracy of Mr Henry F J Guppy of the Colonial Treasury, Member of the Scientific Association of Trinidad and the Official Compiler of Records).

The authorities gave with one hand and took with the other: such rations were priced at 5 ½d per ration, to be deducted from the wages of the Immigrant (effectively halving their income). That tannias, yams and other such ground provisions, not to mention salt fish or salt meat (for a group that was mainly vegetarian) were alien to the immigrants, meant that it was really up to them to source the food they preferred to eat. Notably omitted was flour. How were they supposed to make their rotis?

They grew what they ate and bought what they couldn’t. Relative to the broader African community that gravitated toward the urban centers, The Indians were a community of the countryside (capitalizing on the land some had been granted); they became their nation’s agriculturists, rice farmers, cattle farmers, milk sellers and gardeners.

GONE SHOPPING

There were specific ‘coolie stores’ that catered to their culinary needs. An advertisement in 1898 for Rohinis Coolie Stores on St Vincent Street in Trinidad announced its new stock recently arrived from Calcutta: tins of cumin and ferragrek [sic] seeds bags of turmeric, black pepper, mustard seed, coriander seed, garlic, gram dhol [sic], moosor dhol, cases of ghee, mustard oil, choora (bangles, usually for weddings) and other sundries.

One writer set the scene: “There were vendors of curry and a curry powder, pairs of all kinds of food preserved in curry, curry to be taken away, or to be eaten then and there – paper, packages boxes, bottles of it jars, pots, cups bags, coconut shells, full of curry – and everything living or inanimate in the marketplace, was as distinctively east Indian as the curry itself “ Lallapee’s or Mattai’s in Georgetown boasted a similar range of Indian foods, but also included “pre-blended spice pastes from Britain”.

It was a hard life, under harsh conditions, that was justifiably described as ‘a new system of slavery’. They were often ghettoised on the estates they worked for, especially in BG; their contractual arrangements were abused, their religious rituals proscribed by various Governments, their marriages not recognised, and social ostracism forced them into protective clannishness (and then they were criticized for not mixing with the wider society). Cultural erasure had always been an overt goal of the colonisers; and here it was in full force.

The Indians saw themselves as the society actively wished them to be seen: as outsiders. And even today, the idea of ‘the creole’, or someone – anyone, of any colour– born locally, still does not apply to the Indian community.

HOME IS WHERE THE FOOD IS

What all this meant was that their expansive food culture of eleven clear culinary zones, was cloistered away from the wider society. The Indians, jeered at as ‘curried mouths’ by a society unfamiliar with their food, kept themselves, and their food, to themselves.

Food as always was a salvation. It sought to recreate the memory of home and the taste of home; and is the basis for many of the Indian foods enjoyed today.

From Uttar Pradesh for instance, came many of today’s Indo-Caribbean street food menu items, such as the “patty of fried pulses” called bara. There was also phulauri , a deep fried ball of chickpea flour. Madhur Jeffries, an authority on Indian cooking writes of buying a street food item called chane jor garam which she describes as chickpeas, highly spiced with cumin, red pepper, and mango powder, and served in newspaper cones. In the Caribbean, a version of this is simply called channa. She also mentions Aloo ki tikiyas: potato patties sold by street vendors. That is today’s Caribbean aloo-pies.

The list is extensive: Dhallpouri, a local version of the Indian roti flatbread emerged also from Uttar Pradesh from the Indian dal puris. This was the typical portable -lunch- item for the Indian plantation workers: they carried these flatbreads usually stuffed with curried channa or other vegetables. It was the forerunner of what would become roti (which in the Caribbean refers both to the flatbread wrap as well as the curry-stuffed meal).

As one Indian visitor to Trinidad (Sharmilla Sen) noted, “The Indian villages in the Caroni Plains, find their doubles in similar villages in eastern Uttar Pradesh and Bihar in modern India. The new arrivants from the other end of the Empire had brought with them the architecture, clothes, flora, languages, and religions of the Indo Gangetic plane. The Ganga was transposed upon the Trinidadian landscape, and the Caroni invested with the properties of India’s secret river.”

Most of the immigrants were vegetarians – a dietary choice many of the Colonial authorities found incomprehensible. They generally ate their talkaris, or vegetables, off plantain leaves, a custom which still pertains today in some ceremonial events such as feasts or weddings. Those who were meat eaters would rarely have been able to afford their preferred meat: goat, the meat traditionally served in most Indian homes (and, via the Jamaican ‘curried goat’ is probably today the best-known Caribbean curry in non-Caribbean communities). Though many came from rice-growing regions, until they engaged themselves in the business of cultivating that grain, rice was often too expensive for them in the Coolie stores. The focus of their carbohydrate diet was flour-based.

The preparation of this food was hard work; and the woman’s work. Even well after the introduction of that great labour-saving item, curry powder, she still made the curry base from scratch. There is a local, and highly accurate, calypso that sings of the woman “grinding masala, grinding masala”. That was the least of her problems.

She was responsible for lighting the chula, the Indian clay moulded fire source. Her day started around three am, when she lit the with the assortment of twigs, sticks and coals available. When it rained, as it often does in the Caribbean, that simply multiplied the difficulty of the task.

Breakfast was no simple snatch-and-run affair. It was the nutritional foundation for a day on the estate. For breakfast, there would be a kind of -fairly basic - roti called sada roti. This would be accompanied by a vegetable choka (flame-roasted vegetables, usually eggplant or tomato, with onions, hot capsicums, garlic etc). The husband, sent on his chores with his vegetable stuffed roti would return for a dinner either of a more elaborate paratha roti such as dhalpourri roti or, once rice became affordable, rice.

Life was centered around the chula and the kitchen. As one scholar (Saheeda Hosein) wrote, “The link between Indo-Trinidadian culture and the culinary skills of a young woman was the sense of virtue associated with culinary creativity.”

That reference to creativity is not to be underestimated. While we’ve looked at the provenance of today’s Caribbean Indian dishes, Indian food blossomed because of the pragmatism of the cooks. They pretty soon figured out how to substitute hard-to-get crops for local ones: chardon bene, or culantro, a local herb that grew wild, was an adequate substitute for curry leaves and coriander, Indian chilies made way for local scotch bonnet and bird peppers, the Indian ‘sag’ made way for the local bhaji made from the leaf of the taro plant: dasheen; the creole Indians incorporated coconut milk (generally found in Kerala and South India); and the African-introduced okra as well as crab became part of the regular Indian, at home menu. Indigenous crops such as pumpkin, the New World tomato, and local imports such as cauliflower, potato and cabbage were incorporated in this new West Indian, Indian cuisine. The core Indian masala (simply a word meaning spice mix) made of rare -in the Caribbean - spices such as asafetida, fenugreek and nigella seeds evolved into an unique Caribbean spice bland: amchar masala.

Indian food is perhaps one of the world’s most heterogenous of food cultures. There are multiple instances of villages from one community startled to find how different their food was from villagers from a neighboring community (Though such differences – mere nuances – would be difficult to spot to outsiders). This begs the idea of ‘authenticity’. One snobbish Indian writer, having sampled Caribbean Indian food in BG and Trinidad sneered that it wasn’t authentic. She was wrong. The food created, reinvented and reimagined by these immigrants was authentically Caribbean Indian. Indo-Caribbean food is today an authentic part of the Caribbean food canon.

And such Caribbean authenticity pertains not only to its unique organoleptic profile but to its social dimension. Perhaps because of the initial trauma of life as one of permanent diaspora;

of the heightened importance of food as community;

of its link with a past and the taste of an imagined homeland;

of food as an expression of a new idea of identity..there is a dimension to Caribbean cuisine - be that Afro-Caribbean or Indo-Caribbean - of its food and food preparation and food sharing, that is exultant.

Food in Caribbean, despite the trauma of its environment, despite the deprivation of its peoples, despite the contempt of the colonial authorities, still retains an aura of celebration and conviviality as though every mouthful tastes of joy and jubilation.