F.
285 F Firepass Ceremony The “firepass” or firewalking ceremony is important because it represents perhaps the most prominent religious ritual of the “Madrassis,” indentured immigrants who came to the Caribbean from South India. It came to be seen as an integral aspect of Madrassi identity in colonial Trinidad. But the firepass ceremony is also important because it has not only influenced but also been partially appropriated by and reframed within contemporary forms of ecstatic Kali worship and related forms of Shakti Puja practiced in postcolonial Trinidad. (Puja is a general term for ritual worship to a deity, and shakti is a conceptualization of cosmic power or energy associated with the devis, or female goddesses, understood as activating the universe in its polymorphous complexity.) Although it is not exclusively the case in South Asia and its diaspora, firepass among Hindus in Trinidad has been principally conducted within the matrix of shakti devotionalism. Perhaps the two most significant influences on contemporary , temple-based shakti worship are the older, communitybased forms of sacrificial Kali Puja and the old-style Madrassi firepass ceremony. Both of these ritual traditions have been adapted and transformed in hybridized relation to each other within Kali’s current, temple-based incarnation (see Shakti Puja in Trinidad; Hinduism—Trinidad). Madrassi identity in trinidad The term Madrassi was commonly used to refer to indentured labor migrants of varying regional and linguistic backgrounds in South India who sailed to the Caribbean through the southeastern port city of Madras (Chennai). An average 80 percent of these so-called Madrassis were equally divided between Tamil and Telugu speakers. In the late 1840s, among the earliest indentured Indian laborers in the colony, there were far more Madrassi immigrants in Trinidad than those “Kolkatiyas” from the North of India, who sailed through Calcutta (Kolkata) to the Caribbean.Yet during the entire period of indentured immigration to Trinidad from 1845 to 1917, the overall number of South Indians only constituted approximately 6 percent of the total 144,000 indentured immigrants from India (De Verteuil 1990). Whereas North Indian migrants were primarily rural villagers, it is believed that those from the South tended to be urban and semi-urban dwellers from the vicinity of Madras (Wood 1968, 139–40). From the outset of Indian indentureship, Madrassi identity was stigmatized within nineteenth-century colonial Trinidad. Though Madrassis were reportedly better educated than recruits from North India, colonial planters and estate managers considered Madrassi immigrants to be troublesome and inferior workers, and it was this opinion that prevailed during the period of indentureship. They were variously considered “dirty in their habits,” needing to be “carefully looked after,” as well as “clannish and lazy” (see Brereton 1981; De Verteuil 1989, 1990; Look Lai 1993; Mangru 1983; Ramesar 1994; Wood 1968). According to Younger (2002, 144), planters in Guyana and Trinidad complained so much by the 1850s about the difficulty of managing South Indian laborers that British colonial authorities diverted the out-migrating stream of Madrassis toward the newly established sugar estates of South Africa, around the port city of Durban. Thus Madrassi emigration to Trinidad was terminated in 1860 (Brereton 1981, 103). Though unsalutary, the colonial European bias against Madrassis is probably not surprising given that British Victorians traced the ancestors of the so-called black races of South India to sub-Saharan Africa, which ostensibly accounted for the “primitive” and “backward” ways of Madrassis (Bolt 1971; Khan 2004). Compared with those from the North, Madrassis were generally darker in skin color and therefore subject to racist prejudices of both colonial Europeans and North Indians in Trinidad. Indeed, Trinidadian society quickly grew accustomed to accommodating the majority North Indian group, who were seen as distinct and who were at times themselves hostile to Madrassis. The historical legacy of this conflict surfaces in the bifurcated classificatory practice sometimes encountered in contemporary Indo-Trinidadian discourse positing “Hindu” versus “Madrassi ”—the former associated with ostensibly respectable North Indian culture and high-caste brahmin identity, and the latter with purportedly primitive South Indian culture and low-caste chamar identity (for broader discussions, see Vertovec 1992; Khan 2004; and McNeal 2011). old-style FirePass PerForMance and its relation to conteMPorary shakti PuJa Firepass and Hosay (Hosay is the local term for the Muslim festival of Muharram) were the two most important festivals celebrated by Indians in the nineteenth century—even more important than the Hindu festival of Divali that is so prominent today (see Hosay). Tikasingh (1973) tells us that timeexpired Indians celebrated the firepass ceremony...
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