Caribbean Voyage: East Indian Music: In the West Indies
In the Fall of '97, Jamaica presented a two-day event on a Kingston fairground, featuring many booths and a main performance stage that showcased the variety, scope, and history of the island's musical and cultural roots. The East Indian tent, featuringbhangraplayers, singers, and dancers, attracted crowds of fascinated Afro-Jamaicans, most of whom were experiencing their compatriots' musical traditions for the first time. Yet East Indians are an integral part of virtually all the Caribbean nations, including Jamaica and especially Trinidad and Tobago, where, today, they outnumber Afro-Trinidadians. Between 1838 and 1917, Asian Indians traveled to the Caribbean as indentured servants, and many stayed beyond their terms of service to put down roots, even become prosperous businesspeople and community leaders. That '97 Jamaican festival and most of the tracks on this 1962 field recording by ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax attest, though, to the strong intracommunal Indo-Caribbean ties that preserved intact the Indian music forms and rituals of their mother culture despite transplantation from Old to New World. "You see the way many people play the Calypso and feel happy," an Indo-Trinidadian man explains to Lomax in a lilting "Trini" accent. "The same way we play this song and feel happy." Yet the revelation of this set is the striking similarities in African and Indian drumming and singing, and, most of all, the African-Indian hybrids that have created new traditions, such as Trinidad's unique Afro-Indiantassdrumming andtansinging.--Elena Oumano