East Indian Music in the West Indies: Tan-Singing, Chutney, and the Making of Indo-Caribbean Culture (review)

Manuel, Peter. East Indian Music in the West Indies: Tan-Singing, Chutney, and the Making of Indo-Caribbean Culture. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000. Xxiii + 252pp., music and text transcriptions, glossary, bibliography, discography, index, compact disc.

A prolific writer on the music of North India and the Caribbean, Peter Manuel's recent publications have focused largely on the "Indo-Caribbean": West Indian descendants of indentured laborers from India, most populous in Trinidad, Guyana, and Suriname, where today they form (by slight margins) the largest ethnic groups. East Indian Music in the West Indies does not attempt a comprehensive portrayal of the musical culture of Indians in the Caribbean, but is rather a focused, predominantly historical and analytical study of a specific musical genre, "tan-singing," with briefer treatment of a contrasting but related contemporary genre, "chutney." This work joins a very short list of scholarly publications on Indo-Caribbean music, the majority of these by Helen Myers and Manuel himself. The monograph is the first academic treatment of "tan-singing," or "local classical singing," as it is normally known in Trinidad. While narrow in its focus, its relevance extends to a wide range of ethnomusicological interests, including the Caribbean, North India, and diaspora studies.

Although East Indian Music in the West Indies deals predominantly with the history and style analysis of local classical singing, Manuel is also interested in showing how this "neotraditional" musical genre and its modern "creolized" counterpart, chutney, reveal "a diaspora society in motion" (xiv): a community in the process of balancing traditional and contemporary cultural influences from India with the influence of the dominant Afro-Creole and Euro-American culture of the region. The study of tan-singing and chutney is contextualized within an analysis of "processes of cultural retention, adaptation, modernization and globalization" (2), relevant to identity construction in plural societies and among diasporas. Overall, Manuel is able to find a balance between "musicological" and "anthropological" orientations that is unique and satisfying.

The volume begins with a brief overview of the social history of "East Indians" in the Caribbean and race relations between Indians and the Creole (Afro-Trinidadian) population. It then presents an overview of Indo-Caribbean music culture, touching on various types of folk songs (deriving mainly from the Bhojpuri-speaking region of North India from which the majority of immigrants came) and religious songs, and introduces the styles of chutney and local classical singing.

The book proceeds to trace the history of local classical music from the arrival of Indians in the Caribbean in the mid-nineteenth century to the present. Without the benefit of an existing body of scholarship on the style, living informants who can give insights into the pre-1930s period, or recordings of the style predating the 1960s, Manuel undertakes the daunting task of determining the stylistic origins and influences of tan-singing from the nineteenth century onward. Prominent among the many questions he investigates is which elements of the genre derive from India (either brought by immigrants or arriving in later years) and which were created in the new land. Manuel is up-front in admitting that some of the questions he poses require hypothetical answers. As an expert on the music of the region and era in India from which the majority of Indians emigrated to the Caribbean (especially semi-classical and dance forms such as thumri, ghazal, and tillana, genres that appear in new forms as sub-genres of tan-singing in the Caribbean), Manuel is in a position to provide some of the most plausible hypotheses.

While the numbers and knowledge of immigrant musicians are open to debate, it is likely that "secondhand versions of dhrupad and court-based thumri and ghazal . . . were evidently transmitted, in however garbled and fragmentary forms, to the Caribbean, where they took on lives of their own" (21...