# Embodied performances of (post-)indenture:
Creolization of Indian dance, music and nadrons in
Guadeloupe

Sandrine Soukaï

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Sandrine Soukaï. Embodied performances of (post-)indenture: Creolization of Indian dance, music and nadrons in Guadeloupe. Journal of Indentureship and Its Legacies, 2024, 4 (2), pp.130-157. 10.13169/jofstudindentleg.4.2.0130. hal-05331528

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# Embodied performances of (post-)indenture: Creolization of Indian dance, music and nadrons in Guadeloupe

Sandrine Soukaï

Sandrine Soukaï holds a PhD in Anglophone Studies (Sorbonne Université). She is Senior Lecturer in Postcolonial Literatures at Gustave Eiffel University (France). Her research interests include the memorialization of trauma in postcolonial arts and literatures; South Asian literatures; the Indian Partition; indentureship; Caribbean literatures; archipelagic perspectives, transcultural phenomena and creolization. She has published several articles and book chapters on Indian literatures in English, Partition and indentureship in the francophone and anglophone Caribbean. Her latest publications include ‘The Postcolonial and Creolisation: Mapping India from the Caribbean’, *Postcolonial Arts and Literatures*, 1(1), 2023, and ‘Mémoire archipélique transculturelle et multidirectionnelle dans Des îles, baisers de Dieu à la terre (2005) d’Ernest Moutoussamy’, in *Pensées insulaires. Aspirations socio-culturelles*, dir. by Catherine Pélage, Françoise Morcillo and Mayumi Shimosakai, Orléans: Paradigmes, 2023, 261–277, and ‘Réinvention postmémorielle et créolisation de Pondichéry dans les arts et littératures de la Guadeloupe’, *Synergies-Inde* 12, 2024.

Submission Date: 1 November 2023; Acceptance Date: 1 July 2024; Publication Date: 31 December 2024

## COPYRIGHT

© 2024, Sandrine Soukaï. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Licence (CC BY) 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
## ABSTRACT

42,473 Indian indentured workers were transported to the French Caribbean archipelago of Guadeloupe between 1854 and 1889. Yet, until recently, the legacy of indenture was marginalized in public memory. The 1970s marked a turning point, with the emergence of *Indianité*, a French Caribbean cultural project aimed at valourizing the Indian components of the region's culturally diverse and creolizing landscape. Drawing on still underdeveloped scholarship on *Indianité*, theories of creolization, studies on embodied memory of past trauma, I analyze how the descendants of Indian indentured labourers reconstruct and transmit the heritage and memory of indenture in Guadeloupe through embodied performances of Indian dance, music and, in particular, the danced and sung theatre known as *nadrons* (from Tamil *nādagam*), formerly staged on plantations. My study interweaves close readings of Indo-Guadeloupean writer, cultural activist and politician Ernest Moutoussamy's tryptic novel *Marianne: fée de notre République du sang-mêlé* (*Marianne: The Fairy of our Mixed-Blood Republic, 2018*) and his poetry collection *A la recherche de l'Inde perdue* (*In Remembrance of Lost India, 2004*) with interviews conducted with Guadeloupean Indian language and dance cultural associations. Combining an analysis of literary texts on the one hand, and cultural activists' projects and experiences on the other, I tease out the paradoxes at the heart of Indian song and dance performances, demonstrating how they oscillate between a return to an ancestral Hindu India, a recognition of the creolization at work in French Caribbean Indianness and, more recently, an opening to the global Indian culture popularized by Bollywood.

## KEYWORDS

nadrons, creolization, embodied memory, indenture, French Caribbean, Indianité, Ernest Moutoussamy

In a recent interview introducing her latest historical novel, *La Mémoire délavée* (*The Faded Memory*, my translation), Mauritian author Nathacha Appanah evokes the similarities and differences between enslavement and indentureship, highlighting that the two exploitative systems treated labour, and therefore human bodies, as expendable. Although they were ‘free’, indentured Indians’ mobility was often restricted to the sugar plantation to which they
were attached (Appanah 2023).¹ In addition, even though ‘whether indenture was slavery or not is ultimately [...] a matter of perspective’ (Lal 2001: 43) and the kala pani crossings were less deadly than the Atlantic slave trade (Weber 1994), the crossings were also often traumatic for those deceived by the fake promises of the recruiters, with some being kidnapped, drugged and forcibly transported. Those who did not survive the harsh conditions of the crossing were thrown overboard: 44,553 indentured labourers left India for Guadeloupe, but only 42,473 arrived on the island between 1854 and 1889 (Schnakenbourg 2005: 499, 526).

Indian indentured workers were forced to travel with few possessions and were stripped of their tangible and intangible cultural heritage. Ill-treated, controlled and at times mutilated, they nevertheless resisted the destitution to which the colonial system exposed them. This is demonstrated by the poetics of *Coolitude* which interrelates the crossings of the Indian Ocean and of the Atlantic and interprets the *kala pani* crossings themselves as a matrix that subverts the caste and class hierarchy of continental India and as the site of an unpredictable redefinition of culture and identity, in other words a site of creolization (see Carter and Torabully 2002).² Drawing on studies on creolization as well as on *Indianité*, a cultural project and critical discourse which emerged in the French Caribbean in the 1970s to valourize the Indian components of the region's cultural diversity,³ and on scholarship on the embodied memory of traumatic pasts, this essay proposes to analyze how the descendants of Indian indentured labourers reconstruct and transmit the heritage and memory of indenture in the archipelago of Guadeloupe through embodied performances of dance, music, songs and theatre.

Indenture and Indian cultural heritage have long been marginalized in Caribbean identity and cultural discourses, even those intended to be inclusive.⁴ In the French Caribbean, owing to the small number of Indian indentured labourers and of Indo-desendants, tenuous links with India, and the need to
learn Creole and then French in order to integrate into Caribbean society, the population rapidly stopped speaking Indian languages. Tamil — which in India is both a sacred and secular language — has been passed on by a few *pouçaris* (from Tamil pūcāri, priest), who officiate at non-Brahminic ceremonies of popular Hinduism, and by *vatialous* (from Tamil vāttiyār, teacher), who memorize the language to perform the *nadrons*, danced and sung theatre (from Tamil *nādagam*) which used to be staged on plantations where they gathered an inter-ethnic audience.⁵ Nadrons draw inspiration from the terru kūttu village dances, a form of street theatre that accompanies Tamil worship in Tamil Nadu (Manet 2017: 27, 103–114). Cultural activists have revived the learning and teaching of Indian languages; it is the main goal of the Guadeloupean Council for the Promotion of Indian Languages (CGPLI), which has been teaching Hindi, Tamil and more recently Sanskrit (CGPLI 2009). The association has undertaken a cultural and research project to record and safeguard the *nadrons* practised in the French Caribbean, spearheaded by Tamil linguist and philologist Appasamy Murugaiyan.⁶

Performances of Hindu epics, myths and chants recur in the works of Indo-Guadeloupean writer, politician and cultural activist Ernest Moutoussamy, a champion of *Indianité* and *métissage* in the French Caribbean, whose writings voice the challenges and opportunities presented by the inclusion of *Indianité* in Caribbeanness. In his tryptic novel *Marianne: fée de notre République du sang-mêlé* (*Marianne: The Fairy of our Mixed-Blood Republic*, 2018), set in the author's native town Saint-François in Guadeloupe at the end of the nineteenth century and the turn of the twentieth century, and in his poetry collection *A la recherche de l'Inde perdue* (*In Remembrance of Lost India*, 2004), the performances of dances, mantras, songs, epics and even danced combats originating from Europe, Africa or India are the ferment of an Indo-African and *Métis* solidarity and fraternity.⁷

*Métissage* (biological and cultural) is a key theme in *Marianne*. It is through *métissage* that the body of the male protagonist, the
indentured Indian labourer Caloupin, who is initially marginalized by epidermal discrimination, but also by a sacralization based on the quest for purity in line with Hindu precepts, and even by a fetishization of Indian blood, is eventually placed at the heart of a creolized Caribbean identity and its cultural constructions.⁸ I will demonstrate that Moutoussamy's work challenges the marginalization of the Indian presence by imagining bodily performances of songs, dance and music from Africa and Europe that echo and respond to Indian sounds and rhythms. Such embodied performances also rally people across ethnic and racial divides and drive them to fight collectively to free themselves from colonial rule. Thus, the liberation of the body — staged during the performances — anticipates mobilization and physical resistance against the colonial system, which, within the economy of Moutoussamy's texts, enables social, moral and even spiritual upliftment. In a last step, I will complement my literary analysis with contemporary commemorations of (post-)indenture and celebrations of Indian culture in Guadeloupe by drawing on interviews carried out with Fred Négrit, Apassamy Murugaiyan and the presidents of two Guadeloupean Indian dance associations, Om Shanti and Shakti. This allows me to highlight the complexity and paradoxes of performances of Indian song and dance in the French Caribbean, pinpointing how they oscillate between a return to an ancestral Hindu India, a recognition of the creolization at work in French Caribbean Indianness and, more recently, an opening to the global Indian culture popularized by Bollywood.

## RACIAL STIGMATIZATION, SACRALIZATION AND FETISHIZATION OF THE MALE INDIAN INDENTURED BODY

Socio-cultural and political representations of the body are central issues in the novel *Marianne*, which promotes the inclusion of
*Indianité* within *métissage*. The novel is divided into three sections, each adopting the point of view of a protagonist, Maba, Caloupin and Marianne. The narrative follows young Maba, a mixed-race girl of white, Amerindian and African origins, in her pursuit of her childhood sweetheart, Caloupin, the son of Indian indentured labourers ostracized from an early age because of his very dark skin colour. Maba's prime objective is to find her long-lost friend and to have a *métisse* daughter with him; this daughter would symbolically bear the name of the French Republic allegorical figure — Marianne — and would therefore incarnate the mixed-raced Republic mentioned in the novel's title.

*Marianne* portrays how Indian indentured labourers, and their descendants, negotiated their integration into the Caribbean society which first saw them as foreigners and accomplices of the colonists in the colonial exploitation system. Indeed, they arrived in a society where hierarchies had already been established between Europeans, Africans and Creoles. For the latter groups, the presence of Indian labourers was a hindrance to labour negotiations with the white planters who considered the Indians cheap and docile labour and pitted them against Afro-Caribbeans. In addition, the Indians' very distinct religious and cultural beliefs made integration more difficult. By foregrounding colour-based prejudice, the novel also highlights an understudied part of the history of the indentured labourers, which is intracommunal prejudice. The Dravidian Caloupin is first rejected by the lighter-skinned Indian women from North India — commonly called *Kalkata* in the French Caribbean — and thus finds himself without a prospective Indian wife (Moutoussamy 2018: 119, 125). Therefore, the novel questions the racialized oppositions of Aryan/Dravidian and North/South India (though the attendant binarism Sanskrit/Tamil is not elaborated upon). Yet the narrative goes beyond the Aryan/Dravidian dichotomy as ultimately, due to his darker skin colour, Caloupin is rejected both by the Aryan Dajhani and by the Dravidian Déva (155). Epidermic
prejudice is mostly interpreted as a consequence of white colo-
nists’ politics: ‘More than ever, I realized how handicapped I was
in a country where Black skin was historically weighed down by
the white man, who had identified it with negativity, with nothing-
ness, with every existential flaw’ (154). With Caloupin, the novel
depicts the manifold marginalization of the body of the Indian
indentured labourer, doubly stigmatized for his indentured status
and his darker skin. This marginalization is what turns the male
protagonist into a champion of cultural *métissage* which, in the
novel, unfolds through performances of dance, song and music
fostering Afro-Indian solidarity.⁹

While *métissage* is a central theme of the narrative, the novel
also presents a diametrically opposed perspective which consists
of claiming blood purity and rejecting all forms of inter-ethnic,
biological or cultural, mixing. This view is embodied by Mangalia,
Caloupin’s Indian mother, who is adamantly opposed to the idea
of her son marrying a non-Indian woman for fear that this would
dilute his Indian blood and culture (Moutoussamy 2018: 176).
Significantly, the novel also evokes purification rites in reference
to Caloupin and Mangalia. For instance, it mentions the ritual
bathing in and drinking of mandja/manja water/manjatani (from
Tamil *mañjaal*, or *curcuma longa*),¹⁰ which are performed prior to
Hindu rites in the French Caribbean (Nagapin and Sulty 1989:
86–87). Mangalia is ‘soaked in her mandja water, permeated with
the incense perfume of her gods’, as she performs ‘*anjali*’¹¹ and
chants ‘a mantra’ to celebrate her son’s becoming the commander
of the Montplaisir plantation (Moutoussamy 2018: 173). All active
participants in Hindu rituals, even dance and music performers,
are expected to perform these rites before joining a ritual event,
like a *valsè* for instance.¹² *Manja* is also used in a variety of ways in
Hindu ceremonies, rites carried out in Hindu temples to thank
the deities for a grace granted. The protagonist Caloupin also
recalls drinking *manja* water under the guidance of the planta-
tion’s Indian patriarch pè Géham, who built a tiny chapel to the
goddess Kali, in the shade of a *moulinkilè* tree, where Indian labourers gather ‘with the *matalom*’ (137).¹³

In *Marianne*, Hindu rites are mostly mentioned through the telling of Hindu epics or myths, the reciting of prayers, and the chanting of mantras praising an ancestral, timeless and seemingly monolithic India from which the Indian male protagonist drinks as if from an inexhaustible maternal spring:

> *On the bitasyon, appa, amma, aya, aka, these beings plucked from over there, also watered me with Indian sap, fertilized my ragged present with Hinduism, made me a son of the Ramayana, of the Veda. I drank the milk of an imaginary India, listened to and learned my mother's mantras and calls to the divine. (131–132)*

References to sap and milk underline a desire to root oneself in a reimagined ancestral, eternal and supposedly pure India imper-vious to other cultures. Milk, also described in the novel as the spiritual milk of the Vedas (137), is highly symbolical as it is com-monly used in Hindu rites in the French Caribbean, including for the strictly codified cooking of rice pudding whose preparation can be set to the rhythm of the *tapou* (also spelt *tapu*). However, the presence of the Creole term *bitasyon* in the passage quoted above — through which the novel indicates that the plantation has in fact become a new fertile ground for the ‘plucked’ indentured Indian — already calls into question Hindu atavism which presup-poses a seamless filiation with (Hindu) India, devoid of breaks, adaptations and cross-cultural fertilization, including *métissage* and creolization.

Although the novel celebrates *métissage*, biological *métissage* can-
not offset the marginalization of the Indian indentured labourer’s
body. The female protagonist, Maba, fantasizes on several occa-
sions about her future meeting with Caloupin, including some
sensual episodes that describe the intertwining of their bodies and
the resulting birth of the mixed-race daughter she dreams of. But
while Maba professes her love for Caloupin, it is above all her hope
of mixing her blood with his that motivates her quest. So, the
potential revalorization of *Indianité* is ousted by an objectification
of the Indian male body, which appears as the target of burning
desire. Throughout Moutoussamy's writings, however, *métissage*
comes to encompass not only this biological aspect but above all
the cultural hybridity at play in the Caribbean. For the critic
Edouard Glissant *métissage* and creolization refer to relational cul-
tural phenomena, but they differ because the fruit of *métissage* may
be calculated in advance while the consequences of creolization
are ‘unforeseeable’, *métissage* ‘concentrates’ while creolization ‘dif-
fracts’ and opens infinite possibilities (Glissant 1997: 34). In his
novel, Moutoussamy complicates Glissant’s definition of *métissage*.
In Maba’s words, *métissage* makes it possible to ‘go beyond, to tran-
scend the physical, carnal nature of the phenomenon, to give it a
soul, to assign it a mission of elevation, of liberation, of the con-
quest of moral and spiritual values’ (Moutoussamy 2018: 87–88).
As indicated in this quote, *métissage* enables cultural contacts that
can become wells of socio-political and economic progress as well
as of moral and spiritual reciprocal elevation. *Métissage* therefore
appears as a phenomenon of intercultural negotiation whose
results are unpredictable; in other words, as Glissant claims, it is
‘limitless *métissage*’, or creolization itself (1997: 34). Moutoussamy
does not use the term ‘creolization’. However, as I shall demon-
strate in the following, in his texts, forms of cultural creolization
take place during and through bodily performances. During these
performances, whether of Indian, African or European origin, the
boundaries — physical and symbolic — that kept bodies and com-
munities apart become more porous,¹⁴ enabling a collective
inter-community galvanization of the population under colonial
rule and giving back a sense of socio-economic and political agency
to historically oppressed individuals.
‘L’ANGELUS, LE KA ET LE MATALOM’: CREOLIZATION OF MUSIC AND DANCE PERFORMANCES

Dances, songs and bodily performances of various kinds appear in
the novel as moments of communal sharing, when identities and
cultures meet and creolize. The novel mostly portrays Indian dances
and songs in its second section, which adopts the point of view of
Caloupin, who grows up on the *bitasyon* Malgré-Tout (Moutoussamy
2018: 114) owned by the Pauverts, infamous white ‘master[s]’
(107).¹⁵ Some passages evoke how two male elders, *vatialous* pè Abo
and pè Gopi, pass on Indian culture and heritage through ritual
songs: ‘We sang. We rehearsed. We challenged each other. We took
each other on. What a beautiful school, despite being forbidden!’
(Moutoussamy 2018: 146). The transmission of Tamil knowledge
and songs takes place in secret, shortly before the Pauverts promul-
gate an order banning all gatherings on the plantation, thereby
putting an end to the sharing of *pujas* and *palsad* that until then had
brought the Indian community together (147).¹⁶ While women
cannot officiate in Hindu rituals and lead *nadrons* as *pouçaris* or
*vatialous* do, Caloupin’s mother, Mangalia, stands out as the prime
custodian and transmitter of Indian culture in the novel through
the myths she tells the villagers, and, in particular, the children of
the plantation. Mangalia who is both physically and symbolically
stripped of her sari — she has to give up her sari for a dress, but she
also displays resilience in the face of deprivation — is able to clothe
her son with her songs, her prayers and her stories.¹⁷ Cultural trans-
mission here is not confined to intra-community relations. Instead,
Mangalia’s songs bring Indians and Africans together and create an
inter-ethnic fraternity on the plantation:

Every Saturday evening, she organized a meeting around our hut where, with stories of Rama, Sita, Radha, Krishna ... she enchanted her audience. Using
the Veda, she learned to free herself from absurd feelings, and lit the embers of fraternity around her. To the children who shared the rotti and panialon she prepared for them, she taught them to cultivate love and tolerance in their garden, where morality played an important role. With Simon, the little Black boy, Jacqueline the chabine, and the Indians, she didn't let childhood wander between borders of bitter fruit ... We were brothers and sisters in her green songs. On our foreheads of hope, she made the four cardinal points dance to the sound of the ancestral drum set to the rhythm of the ka and the matalom. (126)

Indian songs and music have a pedagogical value and a unifying virtue here. Even Mangalia, who wants to protect her son from all miscegenation, gradually changes her worldview through the songs she sings, which 'fertilize' interracial fraternity, as suggested by the adjective 'green' which is part of the extended vegetal metaphor of this excerpt. Fraternity is further highlighted through the sharing of food: the rotti and panialon which are typical dishes of Hindu rites are here shared across ethnicities.¹⁸ Additionally, harmony and togetherness are emphasized through the lexical field of vegetation, including gardening and fruit. Gardening and working the land are central themes of this novel as colonized populations are seen to gain self-sufficiency and autonomy through the collective development of Creole gardens, and thanks to the introduction of *colonage partiaire* which allows them to reap part of the fruit of their hard labour in the cane fields.¹⁹ In the above quote, however, the garden metaphorically represents the fertile ground where children from all communities can come together to grow up and develop feelings of friendship and 'tolerance'. It is also in this way that the 'bitter fruit' symbolizing quarrels, disputes and conflict seem to dissolve under the musical and melodic harmony performed, and no longer represent obstacles or 'borders' between communities. Subtly, the text shifts from a lengthy reference to the Hindu pantheon to the combined sounds of African and Indian drums, which respond to each other.
These Afro-Indian harmonies are reminiscent of Moutoussamy's poem 'L'angelus, le ka et le matalom' from the collection *A la recherche de l'Inde perdue* (Moutoussamy 2004: 89-91). In this poem, after a hard day's work in the fields, a worker is comforted by 'a wonderful music' he hears from the threshold of his hut: 'Fate invented a sublime melody | The sound of the church bell, the ka and the matalom | And like a divine breath caressed the mango tree's top | And I heard the hearts of the West, Africa and India beating in unison' (89). Music transcends the hardships of daily toil on the plantation and the attendant physical pain and exhaustion as a 'sublime' and 'divine' essence emanates from the overheard melody. The spiritual and metaphysical dimension of music is in keeping with Hindu conceptions of chanting and music as a means to bring closer deity and devotee. Moreover, the song contains political undertones as it encourages fraternal 'uni-son' in the face of colonial exploitation.

The politicization of music can also be divisive. This is highlighted by Richard Burton's observation that music was sometimes instrumentalized by Guadeloupean independentists to promote a monolithic identity rooted in Africanity. In particular, from the 1960s onwards, independentists used Creole and gros-ka to promote an Africanist Guadeloupean identity: 'the gros-ka, the African-derived style of drumming ... is systematically opposed in much nationalist discourse to the allegedly "French," "assimilated," or "doudouiste" music of the *biguine*'; this opposition denies Guadeloupe's complex musical heritage' (Burton 1993: 18). According to Burton, this instrumentalization also explains why, in the 1980s, Guadeloupeans of Indian origin felt the need to revive their musical culture:

> It is hardly surprising that, as nationalist discourse beat the gros-ka with ever greater vigor, so many Indians would feel the need to foreground talom and matalom (East Indian drums), not (save in the case of a tiny minority) with any separatist programme in view but rather to secure their place in Guadeloupean society by underlining the East Indian contribution to its culture. (19)
In contrast, Moutoussamy's writings present musical performances as privileged modes of cultural transmission and sharing. Music and cultural *métissage* are thus inseparable in these texts, where the harmonious resonance of sounds in a multi-ethnic collective space creates social and political fraternity. 'Fraternity' is a value dear to the writer's heart. It is recurrent in his novels and poems, where it appears both as the ferment of cultural *métissage* and as its outcome. Thus, Caloupin declares: 'I was at work to oppose Indianization to assimilation, to build a small Republic of races united by fraternity' (Moutoussamy 2018: 149). 'Fraternity' echoes the French Republican motto, which Moutoussamy, who was mayor of Saint-François (1989–2008) and deputy to the National Assembly (until 2002), also praises in his political essays. He adopts and adapts this 'fraternity' to the island's cultural, social and political context. The interracial harmony depicted in his texts also aims to place the Indo-Antillean at the centre of French Caribbean identity, as the Indian body's historical marginalization from the plantation matrix in which creolization and *métissage* took place has had a long-term impact that is still felt today. It is therefore not surprising that the performances of dance, song and music, that galvanize populations of all cultures and ethnicities in Moutoussamy's novel and poetry, also foster political alliances and restore the desire of subjugated populations to emancipate themselves from colonial exploitation and resist cultural and political assimilation.

## RESTORING AGENCY AND ROOTEDNESS TO THE COLONIZED BODY THROUGH 'LYRIC ITERATIONS' OF SONG, DANCE AND MUSIC

While the celebration of Hindu rites was not prohibited on plantations and the contracts of Indian indentured workers stipulated
that they were entitled to four days off for the yearly celebration of *Pongal*,²⁰ restrictions were sometimes applied. In *Marianne*, the Pauverts, owners of multiple plantations, temporarily forbade gatherings. Festive and religious meetings thus took place in secret, in defiance of colonial prohibitions. In this sense, these times of sharing also became moments of resistance: ‘A tiny chapel made of woven coconut leaves sheltered its deity ... A few Indians would parade discreetly across its threshold ... It was a place of rebirth, and often, in the evening, people would meet nearby with the *matalom* to glorify the gods and heroes of mythology’ (Moutoussamy 2018: 137). The chapel is not just a physical structure but an embodiment of the community’s spiritual and cultural identity. The very act of constructing it from local materials — ‘coconut leaves’— signifies a physical manifestation of reverence and connection to the land. It embodies the community’s resilience, autonomy and resistance to colonial powers and demonstrates how they maintain their spiritual practices through tangible expressions. The fact that they gather on the periphery indicates that the chapel acts as a space of both marginalization and creative cultural persistence. It evokes the idea of carving out an Indo-Guadeloupean space, which is underscored by Caloupin’s desire for self-sufficiency.

The above passage is immediately followed by Caloupin’s plans for economic emancipation, as he contemplates building his own hut, ‘making the land profitable’ and ‘settling on a plot of land’ (Moutoussamy 2018: 138). A few pages later, he is the one who encourages the Indian community of the Montplaisir plantation to perpetuate their Hindu rites to resist servility and despondency:

> *The Indians were a servile workforce ... They barely received the sound of their matalom! At my call to arms and initiative, discreetly, a small Maliémin chapel nestled in the woods under an imposing poyé tree that seemed to have been waiting for this chapel. Without delay, a puja brought together devotees who refused to deny themselves and forget India altogether ...*
Tapu, matalom and talom rang out, calling and begging [the deities of India] to come to their children's bedside. Tamil songs and prayers rose up in the foliage ... And it was a beautiful response to the colonial will to erase everything that did not symbolize and represent the West. (144–145)

Songs are not simply a temporary outlet for the suffering endured on the plantation, but they also contribute to collective action. Thus, it is against a backdrop of musical celebration combining Creole and Tamil songs that Caloupin is acclaimed when he becomes *commandeur* of the Montplaisir plantation (169–170). This position could easily have isolated him from the other sugarcane workers — instead, he embodies hope: ‘We were happy and proud. In the evenings, we sang. We forgot our misery’ (169). In his new role as *commandeur*, Caloupin also continues to promote Afro-Indian solidarity and fraternity, and strives to revalue the labour of the land and the cane:

> Labour was gradually stripped of the ugliness of the past. Stripped of its shell of servility, it became a source of freedom. We worked while we sang. Better still, we sang while we worked. Creole and Tamil refrains ensured a kind of elevation. I was heartened to finally see the two ethnic groups working together to earn their daily bread. The masters’ strategy of isolating the Indians, so that they would not be influenced by the emancipatory ideas of the Black people and Mulattos, was defeated. (170)²¹

The repetition of the verb ‘stripped’ is especially subversive, as this same term is generally used in the course of the narrative to describe what the indentured labourers were deprived of. Soon after Caloupin takes over as *commandeur*, Indian celebrations, festivals and rituals are revived at Montplaisir: ‘Under the authority of the elders, the *divali* or festival of Light and the *pongal* — a family festival with oxen — were revived. From time to time, *puja* gatherings were held. The *sanblanni* ... returned to Montplaisir’ (175).²² The ‘battle’ waged by Caloupin ‘to deliver the cane from
its curse' and help the agricultural workers — Indians, Africans and Métis — to become self-sufficient is also undertaken in parallel by young Maba, who participates in the council of *géreurs* (initially made up of eighteen 'Blancs du pays')²³ where she ends up reuniting with Caloupin in the final section of the novel (253). Through the trajectories of Maba and Caloupin, their defence of *métissage* and Afro-Indian solidarity, and their promotion of a *colonage partiaire* that would benefit sugarcane workers, the novel closely relates the perpetuation of intercultural bodily performances to social mobilization and economic emancipation.

The bodily and kinetic performances that permeate Moutoussamy's texts (the novel and his poems) re-root displaced bodies — both indentured labourers and former slaves — by recreating complex 'affect-worlds' in which multiple traditions and cultural heritages come together. In her essay 'Affect, Body, Place', Ananya Kabir highlights that 'affect-worlds' that are 'epidermal and haptic' and are 'invoked through processes of embodiment' were 'created through the displacements and deracination that European expansionism set into mention'. These affect-worlds recur in cultural productions 'arising out of spaces of collective trauma'. She therefore calls for the development of critical toolkits that return the body 'to the center-stage of analysis', arguing that '[t]he ways in which the work of trauma embeds the body in place, as well as the processes which have displaced it, demand attention' (Kabir 2014: 72). Drawing on this perspective, I contend that Moutoussamy's novel *Marianne* and his poetry examined here create 'affect-worlds' by incorporating bodily performances of dance, song and music within their texts. These embodied performances can be read as 'lyric iterations', that is to say poetic fragments inspired by 'vernacular mythopoeses', like Hindu ritual chants for instance, which repeatedly erupt in the narrative in the form of song, image, drama, poems, etc., and resist assimilation 'into the teleology of the narrative' (Kabir 2014: 65; see also Kabir 2005: 33).²⁴ Moreover, far from being monolithic, as might appear
at first sight, these performances can be interpreted as ‘multidirectional’ memory practices, to use Michael Rothberg’s coinage, as they bring together, in particular, the cultural legacies of enslavement and indentureship (Rothberg 2009). They are also creolized, as evidenced, for example, by musical performances combining rhythms and sounds from Africa and India.

Nonetheless, when reading Moutoussamy’s novel, one might wonder whether the ‘magnificent ballet of mixed bloods’ (2018: 122) he praises in his novel truly reflects the reality of the time and indeed present-day reality, or whether this vision is idealistic and driven by the writer’s hopes. While it is undeniable that *métis-sage* and creolization take place in Guadeloupe and are even an object of pride for many, how does Indian culture, so intimately linked to Hinduism and, for many, to the reinvention of an ancestral (Vedic) India that no longer exists, adapt to contemporary realities and to the intermingling of peoples and cultures in the French Caribbean archipelago? To what extent is Indo-Caribbean dance and music shaped by Afro-Caribbean musical culture and how does this translate into embodied performances in Guadeloupe? To answer these questions, I turn to interviews held in 2023 and early 2024 with Tamil scholar Appasamy Murugaiyan and Guadeloupean cultural activists and performers contributing to the preservation and transmission of Indo-Guadeloupean cultural heritage, in order to examine how this culture is transmitted through public and private bodily performances.

## MULTIFACETED INDO-GUADELOUPEAN BODILY PERFORMANCES

In 1975, Singaravelou observed with regard to the ‘creolization of the Indians of Guadeloupe’ that there was a ‘fixation’ of Indian identity around Hindu rites and a ‘homogenization’ of these rites inspired mainly by Tamil culture (1975: 139). More recently, a
similar point was made by Murugaiyan when examining Tamil
songs in the French Caribbean: ‘ritual, art and culture represent
an indissociable whole and form the basis of Caribbean Tamil
identity. This identity, which has been built up over a century and
a half, is founded in particular on the heritage that the Tamils
imported from India’ (2012: 8). These two critics underline the
predominant place occupied by Hinduism in the conception of
*Indianité* and of French Indo-Caribbean culture. On the other
hand, they question the possible creolization of this culture which
is based on a ‘Tamil heritage’. As creolization is a transformative
process, it is opposed to the very idea of ‘fixation’ mentioned by
Singaravelou. Do bodily performances — dances, songs, Indo-
Caribbean theatre — confirm this fixation, or are they, on the
contrary, evolving through international exchanges or/and trans-
forming through contacts with the multiple cultures that coexist
in the French Caribbean, as suggested in Moutoussamy’s concep-
tualization of cultural *métissage*?

The creolization of Indian music in Guadeloupe is illustrated
by the linguistic creolization of Tamil *nadrons* that has occurred in
the archipelago. Murugaiyan explains that Indian languages are
now only practised in limited and mainly ‘sacred’ settings and that
the transmission of Tamil, in particular, and to a lesser extent
Hindi, is essentially oral, as part of the learning of the *nadrons*
originally performed during Hindu rites (2012: 1–2). The *vatialous*
act as interpreters and accompany the *pouçaris*. They are the first
to learn and pass on the *nadrons*. Murugaiyan demonstrates how
the orally transmitted Tamil underwent ‘creolization’ processes
(2012: 4). However, the *vatialou* and *pouçari* elders, who embodied
a living memory of Indo-Caribbean culture because they could
not only pass on the *nadrons* but also recount the experiences of
their ancestors on the plantations, have disappeared. In 2022,
Guadeloupe lost André Perianayagom who was also known as ‘a
walking encyclopedia of Indo-Guadeloupean heritage’
(Murugaiyan 2016: 155–159). Perianayagom, who grew up on a
plantation and worked in cane fields, learned the *nadrons* orally when he was a teenager (Murugaiyan 2019: 38). He later made a handwritten transcription of the *nadrons* he had memorized in creolized Tamil. His passion for *nadrons* was also conveyed through his expressive dance steps and body language. Perianayagom was eager to pass on not only his love for Tamil songs, but also the craft and sewing techniques he used to make his own costumes — like the headdresses or *narè* — worn for *nadron* performances. Some of them were bequeathed to associations such as Om Shanti, an association which continues to make its own ornaments and props for *nadrons*.

Another evidence and explanation of the creolization of *nadrons* could be the way in which the repertoire sung was adapted in the French Caribbean. Once sung on plantations for hours on end, *nadrons* are now only performed for a couple of hours at most, and only selected excerpts from a few *nadrons* are customarily sung. Besides, *nadron* performances have moved from the sacred space of the chapel or the temple to the *laïque* public sphere and perfectly illustrate ‘how permeable the apparent divide between the sacred and the profane’ is (Benoist et al. 2004: 84).²⁵ As briefly mentioned earlier, *nadrons* can be performed for a religious ceremony, but also to welcome an Indian dignitary, during an Indian festival, for commemorations or municipal fes-tivities where cultural associations may be called upon.

Although, as Murugaiyan points out, Tamil language has been maintained in the French Caribbean mainly in the sacred sphere and through oral transmission, Indian languages are now also taught both orally and in writing, thanks, in particular, to the work of the cultural association Guadeloupean Council for the Promotion of Indian Languages (CGPLI). The association regularly organizes workshops, events, teaching and training courses and celebrations of Indian culture and languages for the entire Guadeloupean community. In January 2024, the association’s efforts earned its president a *Padma Shri* award from the Indian
government, attesting to the growing visibility and recognition of Indo-Guadeloupeans by mainland India (Nomel 2024). Young Indo-Guadeloupeans — whether cultural activists or religious officiants — are increasingly seeking to master the written lan- guage, in particular, to better appropriate the songs they generally learn by heart. The use of the written word is thus not solely a means of preserving a unique linguistic and cultural heritage whose elderly custodians are no longer, but also a way of empha- sizing the respectability of Hindu traditions by presenting Hinduism as a ‘book religion’.

The emphasis on the written text, exemplified for instance by the teaching given by the *pouçaris* Jocelyn Nagapin and his son Jérôme Nagapin, reflects a desire to authenticate and authorize Indo-Guadeloupean languages and Hindu ritual practices. Their teaching relies on texts that came with Indian indentured labour- ers in the nineteenth century and are now precisely kept like family heirlooms, though Murugaiyan observes that they are often in poor condition (2012: 216). For the Nagapin family, the learn- ing of songs, sacred texts and epics — the *nadrons*, the Mahābhārata, the Rāmāyana, the Vedas — cannot be separated from the study of written languages (Tamil and Hindi), the learning of rituals and of instrumental performance and even the local crafting of instru- ments, such as Indian drums, which is transmitted within the family. In *Marianne*, Moutoussamy goes even further, imagining that drum-making is done inter-ethnically, with an African help- ing an Indian to make a *matalom*: ‘I saw the Black man Labry helping the young Babouram to make his *matalom*, supplying him with goat skins, string and rings’ (Moutoussamy 2018: 175). Such cooperation might have taken place on the plantations if we con- sider, as Shona Jackson points out for example, that the two communities interacted despite the colonial rules aimed to keep them apart (Jackson 2012: 4).

Although Indian culture has undeniably been transformed in
the French Caribbean through contact with multiple African,
European and, to a lesser extent, even Amerindian influences, it remains controversial to speak of a creolization of *Indianité* or a creolized *Indianité* in a society where *créolité* and *créole* are often still associated with Africanity. Nevertheless, both Moutoussamy's fiction and poetry, which deal primarily with biological and cultural métissage, and the interviews I carried out with cultural activists and local performers, demonstrate that Indian bodily performances, like danced and sung theatre, have a specifically Caribbean variant. Even though Indian drums are used in a highly codified Hindu religious context, Indian tempos have also now a distinct and evolving Caribbean inflexion. What is more, African sounds and music have entered Indo-Antillean 'show music': 'Here, the entire Indo-Creole instrumentarium comes together, in various combinations, more or less close to the most contemporary models from India, but also from other Creole islands where there is an Indian presence' (Benoist et al. 2004: 85–86). This proves that, contrary to popular belief, the Indian culture of the French Caribbean is not a fossilized version of a culture inherited from nineteenth-century rural India, but a living and dynamic culture open to creolization and to changes of various kinds.²⁶

Indeed, diversity, transformation and creativity emerge from the Guadeloupean Indian culture depicted in the interviews conducted with singers and dancers whose practices coexist and diverge just as ostensibly. A telling example of this diversity, which is directly linked to the memory of indenture, is the 'vast “local” repertoire' of little songs known as *sillarai pāṭṭu*. Composed in Tamil, they 'relate the experiences and conditions of life on the plantations' (Murugaiyan 2012: 35, see also Manet 2017: 117–21). Similar 'cane working songs' can be found across the Caribbean, but they differ on each island. Peter Manuel evokes those of Trinidad which are on the decline but might be revived through increasing access to mass media, radio, TV, etc. (Manuel 2011). Digitalization and the use of social platforms and online media might also be a way in which these songs could be safeguarded in
Guadeloupe. Dance associations like Om Shanti and Shakti make increasing use of social media platforms to promote cultural events and dance courses. They have also widened the scope of courses they offer over the years: Om Shanti has diversified its classical training by adding to bharatanatyam, kathak and odissi, while Shakti has included Bollywood dances. Alongside the courses they provide, they also partake in festivals and some members join competitions at home and abroad (Nagapin and Nagapin 2023; Raghouber 2024).

Indo-Antillean culture as transmitted through the performing arts — dance, song and theatre — is therefore in constant evolution. It remains to be hoped that the links that the French Caribbean and Indo-Caribbean people are trying to develop and strengthen with mainland India do not lead to a ‘decreolization’ of Caribbean *Indianité*, which would in itself be an impoverishment.²⁷ Additionally, what is perhaps to be feared is a loss of the memory of indenture as the growing attractiveness of Bollywood culture is driving the development of show music and dance. In this sense, the fact that secondary school curricula now include, albeit timidly, this part of Guadeloupe’s history, is a welcome step forward. A systematic introduction of literary texts on indenture such as the works of Moutoussamy and other (Indo-)Caribbean authors in (French) Caribbean school curricula and university courses would also be a way of preserving and valourizing the memory of indenture and of better assessing its present-day impact on identities and cultures in the region.²⁸

## ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I wish to express my sincere gratitude to Fred Négrit and Appasamy Murugaiyan for the interviews they gave me in respectively in December 2023 and January 2024 about their work to collect and archive Tamil songs in Guadeloupe. I am indebted to Professor Murugaiyan for sharing his expertise on Tamil singing. I am
extremely grateful to the outstanding and generous late André Perianayagom, whom I had the pleasure of interviewing and watching dance and sing on several occasions between 2019 and 2021. I warmly thank Annick Raghouber, Indo-Guadeloupean cultural activist, dancer, teacher of Indian dances, and founder of the Om Shanti association, as well as Jérôme Nagapin and Raïssa Nagapin, co-founders of the Shakti association, for generously sharing their experience and knowledge of Indian performance dance and ritual dance in Guadeloupe. Finally, I would like give special thanks to Ernest Moutoussamy for his invaluable insights that have deepened my appreciation of his work.

## NOTES

1. An alternative title could be The Washed-out Memory. While sounding less idiomatic and more informal, this second option would more clearly refer to waters and oceans which are central themes in the novel given its focus on Indian indenture in Mauritius. The novel has not been translated into English.

2. On the etymology of the term *kala pani*, see, for instance, Mishra (2021: 19–20).

3. The concept of *Indianité* was first introduced by Martinican scholar Gilbert Francis Ponaman (see Mohammed 2017: 221). Laurent Farrugia compared *Indianité* to Négritude and defined it as a step towards more cross-cultural dialogues and towards Antillanité (Farrugia 1975). *Indianité* was further elaborated upon by Moutoussamy (1987).

4. For recent studies pointing to the marginalization of the Asian presence in Caribbean discourses, see Kabir (2020), Phukan (2022) and Islam (2023).

5. For *vatialou* and *nadron*, see Murugaiyan (2012: 3, 5). For *pouçari* (also spelt *pousari*) see Kermarrec (2022: 86). The word *pujārī* is also found in Hindi, it comes from Sanskrit. While popular non-Brahminic Hinduism originating from South Indian villages is majoritarian in the French Caribbean, classic vegetarian Hinduism from North India was introduced three decades ago in Guadeloupe.

6. Fred Négrit and Appasamy Murugaiyan have worked on collecting and archiving Tamil songs in Guadeloupe within the project 'Patrimoine Indo-Antillais: Réappropriation, Formation et Transmission' (Indo-Antillean Heritage: Reappropriation, Training and Transmission) launched in 2020.
7. None of Moutoussamy's works have been translated into English. The translations provided in this article are the author's.

8. Racialization and racial discrimination are central themes of the novel. They apply to Indian labourers as well as to Africans, but my analysis will mostly focus on the Indian male protagonist.

9. This emphasis on *métissage* as a ferment of Afro-Indian solidarity relies on a laudatory conceptualization of *métissage* which excludes the violent colonial history and racial politics that shaped *Métis* identity and *métissage*. This colonial burden led Edouard Glissant to evoke the ‘damnation’ of *métissage* (see Glissant 1969: 219). Commenting on this often forgotten aspect, Jean-Luc Bonniol explains that, to some extent, *métissage* could be interpreted as ‘a process generating social fragmentation that supports the colonial hierarchical order’. He recalls that the idea of *métissage* originally relied on the same essentialist arguments as the concept of race (2001: 12).

10. Term used by Nagapin and Sulty (1989: 107).

11. In Sanskrit, *anjali* means 'gesture of reverence', 'greeting' or 'blessing'.

12. Name given, in the French Caribbean, to the ear-piercing rite that takes place during Hindu baptism. This rite is also called by its Sanskrit name *karnavheda* in Sanskrit, see Nagapin and Sulty (1989: 127).

13. *Mouninkilê* or *moulinkilê* (Moringa oleifera) was originally widely used by Indian indentured labourers in traditional medicine and cooking; its leaves are believed to have purifying properties. The tree can be found in Indo-Guadeloupean gardens where people sometimes consider it as 'the tree of life' (Jiouandan 2019: 222, 233, 290).

14. 'Porosity' is a key concept of many Hindu rites and beliefs which might have influenced Moutoussamy's conception of *métissage* as a mixing that is not merely biological and cultural, but also spiritual. The idea of 'porosity' underpins Marriott's understanding of Indian and South Asian culture as 'transactional' and 'characterized by explicit, institutionalized concern for givings and receivings of many kinds in kinship, work and worship' (Marriott 1976: 109).

15. The Creole term *bitasyon* comes from the French 'habitation' used in the French Caribbean to refer to plantations. The novelist drew on historical archives and life stories to describe life on this plantation. I remain deeply grateful for the time he devoted to helping me better understand his oeuvre and the socio-historical, political and cultural context in which it is embedded, over the course of our various interviews between 2019 and 2023.

16. As Jouandan explains, 'when food is consecrated and offered to divinities, it is called palsad in Guadeloupe. The word palsad comes from the Hindi “prasād” meaning “splendor” or “serenity.” After the offering, the palsad is shared with the officiants' (2019: 231).
17. Note the potential echoes of Draupadi in the Mahābhārata epic.

18. *rotti, loti*: Indian flatbread made of flour fried in oil; *panialon*: flat sweet doughnut (see Nagapin and Sulty 1989: 253–54).

19. On Creole gardens as an integral part of French Caribbean traditional agricultural and cultural heritage, cf. Degras (2016).

20. Pongal is the great rice festival held in Tamil Nadu in January. Sundays and French public holidays were also non-working days (Schnakenbourg 2005: 874).

21. Note that I translate Moutoussamy's French term *Nègre(s)*, which is devoid of pejorative or racist connotations in the French original source, as 'Black people' or 'Black man'.

22. *Sanblanni* is the celebration of the dead, which corresponds to All Saints' Day (cf. Nagapin and Sulty 1989: 254).

23. This term refers to White Creoles, also referred to as *Béké* in the French Antilles.

24. Note that Moutoussamy's texts do not directly quote the lyrics of Hindi or Tamil chants but describe the instrumental, vocal and corporeal staging of such performances and their impact on performers and audiences alike.

25. Note that this page number (and the following) refers to the digital edition made by sociologist Jean-Marie Tremblay for the online library of Les Classiques des sciences sociales. I purposefully use the French term 'laïque', as laïcité is, as explained by scholar Meritxell Martín-i-Pardo, a type of secularism. Etymologically, the two words also refer to different conceptualizations of the non-sacred (see Martín-i-Pardo 2011: 498, note 2).

26. The main routes of regional, national and international exchange (including also cultural imports and transformations impacting dance, music, song) between Indo-Guadeloupean culture and that of other Indian diasporas are listed in Benoist et al. (2004: 82–83). Among the countries listed are: Canada, Trinidad, Martinique, France (Paris), Reunion, Sri Lanka, and to a lesser extent French Guiana, Suriname. There have also been increasing exchanges with India and, to a lesser extent, Mauritius.

27. On the decreolization of Indian culture in the French Caribbean, see Kabir (2020). This decreolization is linked to the spread of a neo-Hinduism that attempts to 'Brahminize' French Caribbean Tamil ancestral traditions. This trend coincides with the renewed interest in Tamil culture and its valorization (see Murugaiyan 2019: 51).

28. In 2010, Patricia Donatien-Yssa analyzed the difficulty the Indo-Caribbean artist faced to gain visibility regionally, let alone internationally, and she listed some of the most prolific French Caribbean writers who have written on indenture. Fifteen years later, while
indenture history and memory are increasingly valorized, the litera-
ture on indenture is still insufficiently known and little integrated into
school and university education (Patricia Donatien-Yssa 2010).

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