Tropical longing: the quest for India in the early twentieth-century Caribbean

Abstract

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Indian indentured labourers in the Caribbean and their descendants were viewed by the British and by those within the subcontinent in often contradictory ways – both as docile, more culturally respected alternatives to black workers and as examples of brokenness and degradation from a subcontinental norm. I examine here various Indian and non-Indian views about the status of Caribbean Indianness and about the virtues and disadvantages of these migrants maintaining ties with the subcontinent. An analysis of essays, poetry, cultural societies and short stories from the period and a consideration of both class and spatial assumptions about what constituted Indianness expose the innovative ways in which these diasporic Indians actively shaped and negotiated relationships to British culture, to India and to notions of modernity.

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