Tassa Thunder: Folk Music from India to the Caribbean (review)

Scholarship on Indo-Caribbean music has blossomed in recent decades (including Helen Myers, Music of Hindu Trinidad: Songs from the India Diaspora [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998]; Peter Manuel, East Indian Music in the West Indies: Tan-singing, Chutney, and the Making of Indo-Caribbean Culture [Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000]; and Tina K. Ramnarine, Creating Their Own Space: The Development of an Indian-Caribbean Musical Tradition [Mona, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 2001], among others), shedding new light on a region where musicological interest has heretofore almost exclusively centered upon Afro-and Euro-Caribbean traditions. Peter Manuel’s film Tassa Thunder: Folk Music from India to the Caribbean is a welcome addition to this body of work.

Manuel is one of ethnomusicology’s most prolific scholars, whose previous work has included studies of dance and music of India, the Caribbean, Latin America, and their diasporas. Manuel’s filmographic style is much like his written work: concise, encyclopedic, and easy to comprehend. He achieves this in Tassa Thunder via a persistent voice-over guiding the viewer through original footage with experts in Trinidad, Suriname, and the United States, ultimately linking musics in these diasporic sites with their Bhojpuri counterparts in India via a series of compelling comparisons.

Judging by the title, one would expect that tassa, an Indo-Caribbean drumming tradition, would be the focus of the film. However, tassa is but one component of a mosaic of folk musics Manuel describes, including the song genres chutney, chowtal, birha, and Alha as well as nagara drumming and the related Ahir dance tradition. Discussion of these genres garner the most screen time, leaving only about fifteen minutes for tassa at the end. In this short amount of time, however, Manuel touches upon aspects of tassa repertoire, performance, and construction, including unique footage of some top tassa bands in Trinidad and New York performing in Hindu, Muslim, and secular contexts.

Overall, Tassa Thunder paints a vivid picture of music in the Indo-Caribbean diaspora, though the film perhaps suffers a bit from its ambitious attempt to cover too much ground in too little time. As a result, the voice-over narrative, which is elegantly scripted and highly informative, unfortunately leaves little room for many of the film’s subjects to speak for themselves. However, the handful of interviewees featured in Tassa Thunder are charismatic and at ease in front of the lens, imparting a sense of personality upon the film that perhaps could not have been achieved with the formalities of a professional camera crew. Indeed, the viewer is constantly reminded that this is a decidedly low-fi production evidenced by shaky hand-held shots with consumer grade camcorders, often-abrupt editing choices, and clunky on-screen titles.

Despite its technical problems, the film’s greatest contribution is indeed the demystification of the origins of many Indo-Caribbean musical genres whose histories have been muddied over time. Compelling also, Manuel traces intra-diasporic musical relationships between and among his field sites in a manner that only a knowledgeable, attentive, and hard-working researcher could do. A lack of technical language makes the film appropriate for select high school and college classrooms as well as the interested public. Music scholars will also appreciate Tassa Thunder’s investigational rigorousness. Though the film’s production quality would preclude screenings where high production values are a necessity, Tassa Thunder is a good example of do-it-yourself ethnographic filmmaking, a task that Manuel has done quite well from videography to distribution.