name="iauw0">Peter Manuel is an ethnomusicologist at City University of New York, and an authority on the music of the Caribbean. His book East Indian Music in the West Indies: Tan Singing, Chutney, and the Making of Indo-Caribbean Culture (Temple University Press, 2000) won the Caribbean Studies Association’s Best Book Award in 2001. This book is also the basis for Afropop Worldwide’s 2008, Hip Deep program on the Indo-Caribbean. Siddhartha Mitter interviewed Peter in New York. Here’s their conversation.

Peter Manuel: My background as an ethnomusicologist was mostly in India. From about 1970 I had been visiting India and was interested in Indian classical music. I studied sitar and did various research and publications on Indian classical music and also Indian popular music. My exposure to Indo-Caribbean music would have started in 1992, which is when I started teaching at John Jay College. Right from my first semester, I encountered students in my classes who had Indian names – like Rajgopal, Chandrapati or whatever – and I thought, “Oh, this is great; people that I can relate to on the Indian aspect.” But I soon discovered that they weren’t from India, they were from Trinidad or Guyana. They didn’t speak Hindi; they seemed not to know about many aspects of Indian culture. But on the other hand were very well informed on certain other aspects of Indian culture: very into Indian popular Bollywood film music for example, they knew all the songs, they could sing along with them. And chatting with them then I discovered that they had a certain familiarity with other kinds of music that I was not familiar with at all.

They mentioned certain kinds of folk songs, like Chowtal for example, which I had never heard of. A certain kind of what they call local classical music or tan singing which I had never heard of. So I became intrigued by all this, and it was something that was in some ways familiar to me, but also learning that there was a fairly large population here in New York City – it would be over 200,000 I believe – Indo-Caribbeans, mostly from Guyana and Trinidad. So I started to make contacts with these people and from there my interest continued and I was able to now do several fieldwork trips to Trinidad and Guyana and Suriname.

Siddhartha Mitter: Let’s go back to describing the kind of music that the indentured laborers brought with them to Trinidad and Guyana.

P.M.: Ok, these are people who would have been coming from 1845-1917. This is after, of course, slavery had ended in the 1830’s. So these were sugar colonies in the British Empire, or in the case of Suriname, the Dutch. There was a need to replace the Afro-Caribbeans who had left the sugar plantations so they started bringing people from India and especially from this one particular area of North India that nowadays would be now called the Bhojpuri region, because that is where they speak this Bhojpuri dialect, you could say, of Hindi. This is the area of Eastern Uttar Pradesh and Western Bihar, sort of around the city of Benares and Patna. So about maybe 80% of the people coming to Trinidad and Guyana and Suriname are coming from this area. And these are mostly illiterate peasants. They are farmers. A handful of them would be literate, and they would be a small group perhaps of Pandits or people who claim to be Brahmans or knowledgeable people and they would be in demand for religious events and so on. But mostly this is a rural folk culture that they would have brought with them, and in the realm of music it is going to be mostly traditional folk songs of that region.

Now, these would fall into various categories. One big category would be women’s songs that women sing amongst themselves. At childbirths, at weddings, at other sorts of life-cycle events, work songs – many of which have now disappeared, both in India and the Caribbean, but some of which are still alive in both areas, or they have been sort of transmuted in different ways, and Chutney being one example of this which maybe we can talk about later. Anyhow, that would be one category of songs brought. Traditions of drumming, for example, semi-professional drummers who play what they call tassa – this is a drum ensemble that you can find in North India. But it is very popular in Trinidad, and is absolutely essential at Hindu weddings in Trinidad and also at Trinidadian and Guyanese Hindu weddings up here in the New York City area, so you have several of these tassa drum ensembles here – it is a very much a dynamic and living tradition here.

Then the question would arise, did they bring any sort of classical music traditions with them? People think of Indian music, they think of sitar and Ravi Shankar and things like that. Definitely there would not be much of that. These are not sitarists from the court of Lucknow that are coming, they are farmers who would not have sitars or probably not have any or much familiarity with that kind of music. They might have heard certain sorts of semi-professional or intermediate versions of things like it, perhaps in temples or on various occasions, so there might have been some sort of awareness of this kind of music but not a strong tradition.

Nevertheless, as these Indian communities then formed – let’s say we’re mostly talking about Trinidad and Guyana during the latter 1800’s – these people are mostly living on plantations, or perhaps they finish their indentured work of five or seven years, they move off the plantation, they set up some Indian villages, they become farmers. The Afro-Caribbeans are mostly living in the cities and towns, there is not a whole lot of contact with them. And so they are in many ways free to develop or preserve as much of their Indian culture as they wanted. New people are coming from India, refreshing the memory of different kinds of songs and so on. And then these communities are taking shape, perhaps even with semi-professional musicians, singers mostly, or perhaps drummers who are invited to perform at weddings or perhaps prayer sessions where they want someone to sing some sort of specialized songs that’s not just a simple congregational song.

And so as these Indo-Caribbean, we can call them communities take shape and assume their own sort of direction and form, by the time we get to let’s say 1910-1920, they have their own traditions of music. 1917 is the last year in which people came as indentured workers. And after that, there was no further input from this Bhojpuri region of India. You’d have occasional holy men coming from India, you would get films and so on coming in the 1930’s, handfuls of records; but in other ways they’re very cut off from India. But by this time they’ve also established their own musical traditions, such that if someone came from India and said, “Oh no, you’re singing that song wrong, that’s not how it goes;” instead of sort of obsequiously trying to correct themselves, by this point the Trinidadians and Guyanese might say, “Well, this is the way we sing it here, and you’re welcome to sing along with us if you want to learn our way.”

So, what I encountered then in my research right from the start was this mix of an old stratum of traditional folksongs, much of which seems to be sung in essentially the same way as it still might be sung in India today, as I can verify now because of my own fieldwork in India. Also, you find the same folksongs being sung in Fiji, which is another place where indentured workers came, also from the Bhojpuri region during the same period. So if you find something sung in Guyana and the same thing sung the same way in Fiji then you know it came from India, because Guyana and Fiji have no particular contact with each other. Alright, so you have this one traditional stratum of old songs, old genres, including some things that may have died out or declined in India itself. Then there are other things that are clearly, they have changed, but along sort of Indian lines, not necessarily through any particular Afro-Caribbean influence.

So I got very interested in this genre that they call local classical music or tan singing which is their sort of reconstruction of the fragments of Indian classical music that they had heard or a few knowledgeable people had brought. And there would be a certain demand for this at weddings or at certain prayer functions or whatever, where they wanted to have serious, semi-professional singers. And I got very intrigued by this kind of music because it was as if they had taken these fragments that they had gotten from handfuls of records or some knowledgeable people that had come a hundred years ago and put these things together in their own way, including genres that sound like North Indian classical music genres: (thumri, kilana, or terana, ghazal, dhrupad, kafi, behag – which is a raga in North India but more like a genre in the Caribbean). So I was struck by these terms and I could see some similarities with let’s say North Indian dhrupad and the Caribbean dhrupad, but it was obviously very different. It was as if they had gotten some fragments, they had put them together in their own way, and at a certain point it became an established style. There was a right and wrong way of singing it, a certain aesthetic to it, and if they heard Ravi Shankar or some musician from India they weren’t necessarily interested in that, they had their own way of doing it.

S.M.: So that feels a lot like it’s a conscious or semi-conscious attempt to redevelop one’s own history; to write or to create, to identify a history and to trace one’s ancestry and one’s history back amongst people who might not have had a lot of documented or archived and so on material, right. It sounds like, not an invention of tradition because clearly they’re drawing on stuff that’s there, but a – do you see where I’m going with this? Is it, in the development of tan singing and this idea of a local classical music; is this to some extent an act of cultural, community cultural nationalism in a way, a cultural affirmation?

P.M.: In some ways; it’s very complicated, I think, during these formative years, let’s say the first half of the 20th century when, yes, they’re getting records of film music from India from the 30’s, but this doesn’t really relate to this semi-professional tan singing or local classical music. That was more of a sort of serious music that would be sung at these special occasions – serious in its way but it’s also very lively and rhythmic and exciting and would have plenty of people who would be connoisseurs of it. Was it self-conscious? Well certainly the practitioners and the people who were enthusiasts of it would appreciate it as something that was traditional – this is Indian tradition. These words are old and they are beautiful and meaningful and many people, I’ve found, are very moved by the words, even if they only had learnt what they meant whether they were conversational in Hindi or not, and generally they weren’t. But they knew that they came from old books or whatever, and for them it was an important source of tradition to them. And they could appreciate that let’s say even though they loved the film music records they were getting from the 30’s and 40’s, those were pretty and fun, but the people who liked tan singing or performed it felt that this was something more serious or rich.

Now, to my perspective, arriving on the scene in the 90’s and with a pretty good knowledge of North Indian classical music, I could hear that it was very, very different. And I would ask old people, “Where did this music come from?” And they said, “Well, it came from India.” And I said, “Ok, well, how did you learn this thumri, because, you know, I’ve heard thumri in India and it sounds very different?” And they said, “Well, this is how we learnt it, this is how I heard it when I was young from the old people.” No one ever could seem able to acknowledge how this music might have evolved or developed, and I think it probably happened, as I said, in the early decades of the 20th century that it somehow took this shape.

S.M.: What are a few of the crucial differences between North Indian classical music, Hindustani classical music and tan singing?

P.M.: Well, first of all North Indian classical music has a whole system of ragas, which they don’t really have in the Caribbean, that is to say musical modes. In the Caribbean it is more a question of song genres, that is to say vocal songs with lyrics taken out of old books, and some of these books are from the 19th century. And these people prize them, and hoard them, and very zealously guarding them in some cases.

Big differences? Well, let’s say they sing something called dhrupad. This is a serious song, and if you know anything about North Indian classical music, you’d know that dhrupad is a very traditional genre, it probably thrived mostly in the 17th and 18th centuries, but it’s still going. A serious vocal song, or it can be done in a classical style, but dhrupad is also done in temples in North India in a certain style, a sort of parallel tradition, and I suspect this Caribbean tradition came from that. In the Caribbean at a tan singing or local classical event, which might be a wedding, let’s say if the groom’s father is an enthusiast of this kind of music he’ll hire these professional musicians. It would be a team of one or two singers and a drummer who plays this dholak barrel drum and a duntow, which is this metal rod that we can talk about later – it is a curiosity in itself. And the singer will accompany himself playing harmonium, and you always start out with a dhrupad, that is a serious song, just like in India. And the text might correspond to a text that you would find in India, because maybe they’re getting it out of some book. It starts out very slowly and then there’s a section where they double the lyrics and they’re singing the lyrics twice as fast, and this also has a certain parallel in North Indian dhrupad style. Aside from that, it’s pretty different. It lasts about five minutes, there’s none of this long-winded alap [introductory improvisation out of rhythym], you know, going on for half an hour or an hour. So these are short songs, the emphasis is on the song rather than the improvisation, they don’t really know anything about raga, but they have a certain theory of this is a correct and this is an incorrect way to, play dhrupad, it should go a certain way, the drum accompaniment should go certain way.

They don’t have the same sort of knowledge of theory that you would get in Indian classical music. If you ask an Indian classical drummer, “Why did you play that rhythm on your tabla?” He’ll say, “Well, this is a tala, or a meter of fourteen beats and this is how it goes, and this is the teka section and it has this particular structure,” or whatever. Or if you ask a classical singer, “Why did you sing that note there and not another note?” He can say, “Well, I’m singing this particular raga, this mode, and this is an important note in it, and I don’t want to sing that other note because then it will sound like some other raga.” And this is what we call theory, you know, referring to abstract elements of melody and meter and so on. I tried to have these sorts of conversations with musicians in the Caribbean and they just don’t have that sort of knowledge, that sort of formal abstract theory. But, if I could play something for them, let’s say a certain sort of recording, they’ll say, “Oh this drummer, he’s playing wrong. That’s the accompaniment should be used for thumri and he’s playing it for behag, he doesn’t know what he’s doing.”

S.M.: So that puts a huge amount of importance on transmission, on having elders and so forth that you can learn from. If it’s not so much being archived, if you will, or systematized in theory and so forth, then it’s much more through practice, right and transmission through practice.

P.M.: Yes, it’s an oral tradition in that sense, which also makes it a little bit vulnerable. Something like Indian classical music can now be transmitted in so many ways. There are websites, there are books in Hindi, English, whatever. You can learn the ragas, the talas, maybe not perfectly but you can learn a lot of stuff. It’s reinforced in so many ways. Oral traditions are a little bit weaker that way; they are dependent on this sort of transmission. Of course, a lot of this repertoire was based on the songs and the meaning of the words, and in Trinidad and Guyana now people don’t really understand Hindi, so the appeal of it has declined and the knowledge base, the audience has changed.

I think, to some extent, this may for a period have actually contributed to a certain kind of enrichment, or dynamism. It may have been an incentive to make it musically more interesting than just a plain folksong. So, for example some of the dholak players, the dholak being a barrel drum, a two-headed drum, and you put it on your lap as you sit cross-legged, and a lot of these drummers in Trinidad and Guyana and Suriname are terrific, you know. They can hold their own against the hottest Indian folk drummers as far as I’m concerned. Perhaps as the comprehension of language declined they compensated to some extent by paying more attention to musical form than would have happened in just a simple folk tradition. But definitely with the decline of language and the lack of any sort of formalized pedagogical system, it’s declined.

And, for better or worse, there’s a certain presence of Indian classical music now in Trinidad and to some extent Guyana and up here. Someone goes to India and studies tabla or sitar or whatever, he comes back to Trinidad and starts teaching lessons or you have little schools. People can learn that and it has a certain advantage, and so young Trinidadians or Guyanese who are interested in music, they might decide, “Well why should I learn this traditional, sort of folksy music that our elders used to sing when I can learn to play Ravi Shankar style?” You can’t really argue with that, obviously North Indian classical music is a richer tradition; but from my perspective, the Guyanese and Trinidadian local classical styles are unique, they have their own kind of beauty and charm. It’s too bad that they are declining and the extant musicians who are still around don’t get the recognition that they could get if there were a real sort of revival of popularity of this music.

S.M.: Amongst Indo-Caribbeans, do different kinds of musics develop in Guyana versus Trinidad and vice versa?

P.M.: In the realm of local classical music there are some similarities and some differences, and it’s very hard to reconstruct how this happened. A few influential musicians might have changed things. Obviously people are going back and forth to some extent, in the old days it would be by boat. It must have taken a day or two to make that trip in 1910. But then musicians in both places would be eager to meet musicians from the other places, but even in a place like, let’s say, comparing one part of Guyana, you know, Berbice, with another region of Guyana, people say they sing differently, different folk songs, different styles, or maybe the same genres but in slightly different style. And even this used to be true with Trinidad, although Trinidad is better oriented. So you have certainly regional variations and then you have Suriname in there, which is its own sort of world. All these people came, well not all of them, but in all regions about 80% of them came from this one area of India, the Bhojpuri region, bringing this – well, I don’t want to say a unified body of songs either, because it’s a big region, it must be 20 or 30 million people there in India now, a lot of variety there – and then they find themselves in this situation, these new communities in the Caribbean, to some extent common languages musically would be formed, of folksongs, but for various reasons musical varieties persist.

Meanwhile some things are done the same everywhere in ways that are very curious; I mentioned before this instrument called the duntow. This is a metal percussion instrument; it is a metal rod that is about four feet long and you play it with this little u-shaped clapper. And so as you’re sitting cross-legged on the ground you have it plopped in front of you pointing up and you’re going sort of ching-chinga-ching-chinga-ching-chinga-ching. Not everyone can play it, but lots of people, whether it’s young boys or whatever, they learn to accompany – this is to accompany songs of various kinds. I don’t think you’d accompany a film song with it, but certainly folksongs, bhajans, that’s a sort of Hindu devotional songs. It’s everywhere in the Caribbean, it’s everywhere in Fiji, Fijians having come from the same part of India. The funny thing is you go to India, well first of all, outside of the Bhojpuri region you won’t find it at all. In the Bhojpuri region itself, it has been found. A Surinamese colleague of mine, for example, has documented its existence there, both the name and the instrument, but it is very, very obscure. So, this is one of the sort of enigmas of diasporas: why something can become so popular when either it died out or fizzled out in the ancestral homeland, or perhaps it was just—well, it’s very hard to say why it works that way.

S.M.: So I want to ask you few things about the impact of various kinds of social and political changes in these countries and these communities over the century, but first, tell me about the Alan Lomax episode.

P.M.: Yeah. As a musicologist, I’m really interested in trying to reconstruct some of these historical aspects of the music. Whether we’re talking about folk music or local classical music or whatever, what did they create themselves in the Caribbean, if we’re talking about the Caribbean, or what came from India? And in some respects these issues are very important to Indians themselves. In some contexts they might pride themselves on having created something in the Caribbean. They say, “Chutney? Oh, we Trinidadians invented Chutney, or we invented the duntaw;” things that might or might not be true. In some cases, they might pride themselves on singing something or preserving something that is very old.

So recordings are very important. We wish there were more of them. There were some made in the late 30’s and early 40’s in Trinidad, but they’re just sort of imitating the records of film songs and popular songs that they were getting from India at that point, so they don’t really tell us anything about Indo-Caribbean music. So we don’t really have any recordings or Indo-Caribbean music, per se, until Alan Lomax, who is this energetic ethnomusicologist that some of you will be familiar with, who goes around the world, especially in the early 60’s; Africa, the Middle-East, Italy, Spain, and also the Caribbean, recording everything he can, and doing a terrific job at it. His recordings, whether we’re talking about of rural Spain, or some village in Italy where they’re singing in some language that no one even understands anymore, or in the Caribbean, they are incredibly valuable.

He did a whole set of recordings in Trinidad, and these recordings, incidentally, are housed at an annex of Hunter University, which is over by Port Authority Bus Station. Many of them have now been re-issued in a series of Rounder Records, and I worked on the Trinidadian one. Lomax recorded a lot of Afro-Trinidadian stuff, which is a whole other subject, because those songs have disappeared, Yoruba songs and so on. He also was very open minded, he realized that Trinidad was not just calypso and steel band and Afro-Caribbean traditions, but also these Indian things. He did a lot of recordings there. He recorded a pretty good gamut of what could be heard at that point. And much of this is presented on a CD that I edited for Rounder, but of course Lomax himself did the recordings and took fantastic field notes and beautiful pictures – I mean, this is a very remarkable ethnographer.

So, what did he record? There would be things, like, for example, women’s folksongs. There’s one on CD, “Juxaar,” which is a grinding song. So you hear this grinding wheel going zhhhzhhhzhhhh, that the women are doing and I guess they’re putting chickpeas or whatever into it and there’s a certain song that you sing with that, which would be in Bhojpuri Hindi, and we presume that it came from India, or perhaps some of them didn’t. Perhaps some of them were made by Indians because the Indians in the Caribbean were composing their own songs, but in traditional style. “Juxaar”that would be in the category of a traditional Indian women’s folksong. And also in the category of precisely the sort of thing that disappears, because this sort of work gets mechanized, no one sits around the grinding wheel anymore, not even in India, hardly. Well, perhaps I should watch what I say there. Even in India a lot of these work songs disappear as things get mechanized. At any rate, that would be one example.

He also recorded Chowtal. This is another kind of traditional Indian folksong, but this is in the category of something that is still widely sung in Trinidad and Guyana during the what they call Phagwah or holi spring festival. And this is usually in early March and February, the weeks leading up to it. It’s a kind of, musicologists would say, antiphonal song. Let’s just say two groups who sing sort of back and forth at each other. You’d have a line of men seated on the ground, maybe six of them, and they sing one line, [SINGS]. And then they catch their breath and the other men repeat the same line, and this is accompanied by the dholak, a barrel drum. And then they sing it a certain number of times, and then they change the rhythm, so it’s [SINGS]. And then you proceed to the next line and it’s going faster and faster, [SINGS]. It’s not a sort of music that you are meant to listen to, it’s really all about being in this group and singing it; and when it’s done well, and for that it takes a little bit of practice with the group, you go through these lines and it gets faster and faster and these tricky rhythmic modulations and it’s great fun and people get very excited and worked up. So it’s a popular thing, you have all sorts of little temple groups, Hindu temple groups, whether we’re talking about Trinidad or Guyana or Suriname or Queens, New York.

They have little competitions, they have, during these weeks leading up to holi you have these groups are doing house visits where they go and visit the house of some friend and sing for a few hours and then the host will give them food and drink and things like that. Maybe even people would get up and dance. These are people who, whatever social inhibitions existed in India regarding dance, those are things of the past. Indo-Caribbeans, at the risk of generalizing, will dance at the drop of a hat, in traditional Bhojpuri style, and usually the best dancers are the old women. At any rate, Chowtal is not specifically a dance genre, but I’ve seen people dance to it when it gets fast and lively. At any rate, that’s another category of folksong that Lomax recorded, and it’s basically the same as is sung today, you can hear plenty of it in Queens, NY in February and March if you hook up with the right people.

I went to India in January of ’07, tramping around the Bhojpuri region, looking for it, expecting to find it all over the place – this was holi season, or the beginning of holi season, end of January, early February. And in fact, I had a hard time finding it. And when I did find it, my friends that I went with from this other village, they said they’d never heard anything like it. I think it exists in pockets in India; and again, we’re talking about a big and under-researched area. So it may exist in quite a few pockets, but it was definitely not a well known genre, and it’s again a sort of a mystery. Why is it so popular in the diaspora, Guyana, Trinidad and Fiji?

S.M.: I need to ask you, where did you finally find the Chowtal?

P.M.: Well, I went to Benares, which is this city in the heartland of the Bhojpuri region and I sort of asked everyone in sight about it and met one or two people who had heard of it or heard it, and I say, well where can I hear it? And I would get answers like, “Well, if you’re there when they sing it you’ll hear it.” Ok. So, on this trip I was there in the Benares region about two weeks, and it had been sort of my mission to find this music because I wanted to compare the styles, and I was getting pretty desperate because after a week I hadn’t found anything. I think with a friend I had met, he said, “Oh let’s go out for a drive in the countryside.” So we were about two hours outside of Benares, sort of in the Mirzapur district, really in the middle of nowhere – I shouldn’t say middle of nowhere, it is a densely populated area, this is a busy farm town – and we were sitting having tea. And at this point I just was becoming sort of a ridiculous pest. Practically everyone I struck up a conversation with, I’d say, “So, have you ever heard of Chowtal?” And they’d say, “What?” And I’d say, “Oh never mind.” At any rate, there I was sitting next to some old man and we were chatting in Hindi. So, he asked me what I was doing and I said, “I’m studying folk music and I’m interested in Chowtal, have you ever heard that?” And he said, “Oh sure.” And he starts singing some chowtal and this is like, “Ok, this is what I’m looking for.”

S.M.: That’s a big moment.

P.M.: Yes, it was exciting. I mean, I think people who live in this region and who are interested in folk music, they know that it exists. And you can find it if you’re in the right place. So he said, “Why don’t you come back tomorrow? I’ll get some friends together to sing.” So, this was quite a ways from Benares, but anyhow, so a two hour drive back to Benares and then I went back the next day, and this is in the evening. We are walking around this Indian village – town, I should say – and it was sort of a surreal experience for me. There were some women singing in a house, I could hear them singing, I could see them huddled around a lamp. And they were singing this song that if any Guyanese or Trinidadian heard it they’d say, “Oh that’s a Chutney.” A very typical melody, [he sings]. I don’t know exactly what the song was or what the occasion was, but it really felt like I was back in Trinidad. Meanwhile, then, a noisy wedding procession comes by. This is with the groom seated on a horse and a bunch of merry-makers, and preceded by drummers playing tassa drums, which is an ensemble that is everywhere in Trinidad. You can not have a Hindu wedding without a tassa drum ensemble. And, anyhow, so this was all very familiar to me.

Then I found my friend that I had been chatting with at the tea stall. He was this old guy, and he said, “Oh let me sing a few songs for you.” And he sang what he called thumri and ghazel, and they were very similar to what you would hear in Trinidad and Guyana. These very idiosyncratic styles that don’t really sound like a classical thumri and ghazel like you would hear at a concert hall in New Delhi. Then we proceeded to this little temple, where, sure enough, my contact had assembled, it’s probably the bhajan group that sings every week, but now we were getting into holi or Phagwah season and they would switch over to singing Chowtal. And I was sort of the honored guest and so they were happy to sing these Chowtal for me. And so this is about twenty, well maybe a dozen singers. And then various other people packed in, just listening for fun. And they sang one or two that were sort of different and didn’t really correspond to the things I had heard in Trinidad and Guyana, and then they sang one or two that were basically identical. Which of course is interesting to me, because, again, keep in mind that the contact from this part of India has stopped as of 1917. You know, they’re getting Indian films, records, holy men coming, but none of that is representing this Bhojpuri folk culture. So it’s pretty remarkable that this folksong style is kept alive, and, as I mentioned, here in Queens, in Trinidad or Guyana it’s not just some doddering, toothless old man that’s doing it; it’s young people, it’s something that’s very popular.

S.M.: So I want to go back to this hemisphere, just one really quick question. When you met a gentleman like that old man and when you get to that village, is there a cultural memory, a historical memory there of people having left – of people having been taken away or people having left to go to the Caribbean?

P.M.: Not much. What they seem to know of the Caribbean was through a Trinidadian cricket team that had come to India, and these people would be sort of surprised to learn that they had Indians there too. And I think I perhaps met someone or another who knew that the Trinidadian Prime Minister, who was an East Indian from that area, or rather, ancestrally, had come through, but basically there’s not much awareness of that. Which is paralleled, you might say, in Guyana and Trinidad, and also Suriname and Fiji to a large extent. They obviously know they came from India; they are proud of that. Usually they don’t know where they came from, the name of the village or anything like that, or even what caste their grandparents were, usually they don’t even know that.

On the one hand, they are proud to be Indian, to be inheritors of a certain ancestral tradition. On the other hand, they are not consumed by a nostalgia to go back to India. They are accustomed to their new home. They are Trinidadians, they are Guyanese, and I experienced this attitude also musically in many ways. If someone comes from India – well let’s say I’m a Trinidadian and I’m really interested in Indian classical music, I mean there are a few such people, not a lot of them, great I want to hook up with an Indian sitarist or whatever. But on the whole they have their own music system, they are interested in Indian film songs, Anup Jalota for example, a bhajan singer, things like that, Indian holy men. But in other ways they have their own music styles, and I’m sure it started happening in the perhaps latter years of indenture period, that, by this time, the Indians have been in the Caribbean for fifty some years. They’ve got their own way of singing, their own style, and perhaps someone would come from India, let’s say in 1915, and say, “Oh no, you’re singing that folksong wrong, or No that’s not how that goes, that’s not how dhrupad goes.” And they might say to them, “Well, this is how we do it here, and you’re welcome to sing along with us.” Or they might say, and I definitely heard this from elder musicians in Trinidad and Guyana, “We sing it the traditional way, it’s Indians who have changed. We are maintaining the tradition.” And, you know, one might smile when one hears these things, but there may also be a certain sense in which it is true, there are such things as marginal survivals, not just in Indian culture as well.

S.M.: Explain that term.

P.M.: Marginal survival” Well, some people don’t like the term, but it’s the idea that a diasporic group may go on perpetuating a tradition, maybe because they have an acute sense of, “We must preserve this tradition,” meanwhile back in the host country, things change.

S.M.: You mean back in the home country?

P.M.: Yes, in the ancestral homeland. Is this why, for example, the duntal, which is this metal instrument that is so popular and ubiquitous in Guyana and Trinidad and Fiji? If you go to India you’ll have a hard time finding it. Was it popular there and then it died out in India? It’s very curious. And, at the risk of digressing, you find this in other realms of Caribbean music as well. In Santeria, the music culture for example in Cuba, you find lots and lots songs from West Africa, what’s now Nigeria, they probably came in the 19th century. And many of these songs probably died out there now. Scholars are verifying that. They go back to Nigeria, Oh that was an old song that we heard, that my grandmother used to sing. This is when they hear some Cuban song. At any rate, so there are such things as what some people would call marginal survivals.

In the case of Tan singing or local classical music, I think it’s more a question of them coming with a sort of fragmentary knowledge or garbled knowledge of certain aspects of North Indian classical music, and reassembling these in a certain way with a certain amount of input from the records they’re getting in the 20’s and 30’s, not of classical music but perhaps of qawwali and ghazal and things like that. Then they have old 19th century or turn of the century song books of collections of song lyrics and they’re assembling these in their own way. And at a certain point, it becomes its own system, if they hear some sort of North Indian classical music from Ravi Shankar or whatever, which, actually, they have very little occasion to hear, but if they might, people who are custodians of this Tan singing system, they’d say, “Oh that’s boring music, our music is better than that, we don’t need that.”

S.M.: So, as the 20th century advances, what does urbanization, the development of wealth in the community, the development of class in the community and so forth do to the music making, to performance, to the different aspects of the music?

P.M.: Yes, well, let’s say if we talk about Trinidad, a lot of things are going to get lost, and not just through urbanization and modernization, but let’s say knowledge of Hindi declines, so all this whole folksong repertoire is declining dramatically. I was at an event in Long Island of Indo-Guyanese sort of prayer and apprenticeship ceremony in which a young man was being apprenticed to his spiritual guide, this pundit, and they did all these traditional songs and so on. And they did a mutteecore, which is a particular kind of women’s song session in which they do a little ritual off in the woods or some field. Nowadays you don’t have many people who can sing these songs anymore because they don’t know Hindi anymore or Bhojpuri. But, there are semi-professional women, there are these two women in their seventies and they are very feisty and funny and they know all these old songs, so they were there too, to sing along with this and to lead the others in singing.

S.M.: Ok, that’s relating to the decline of language, what about urbanization and modernization?

P.M.: Again, the grinding wheel songs and cane working songs and things like that, these are going to decline. There’s no doubt about it. But other things are going to be enlivened by it. When people have money they are going to have access to the mass media, whether it’s cassette recordings, or now CDs, the radio, TV; there could be a sort of cultural revival, especially in Trinidad, if we’re comparing with Guyana and Suriname. Trinidad has had a very lively musical scene, all kinds of music making. It’s a kind of middle-income country, not terribly poor, you know they have oil and ammonia and all that stuff, and it’s been a fairly open political and cultural society.

You know, Indians have complained that they are discriminated against historically and so on, but in one way or another they have been able to preserve a lot of their culture, or innovate new things. Plus they’ve had, perhaps because of their particular relationship with the Afro-Trinidadians, this real sense, especially since the 70’s, of cultural revival and that “We’ve got to promote our Indian culture.” This has stimulated a lot of musical activity, so just like you have all this calypso and steel band and every possible kind of creole, Afro-Trinidadian music making. Likewise on the Indian side they have all these film song competitions, Chowtal competitions, you know. This traditional sort of Tan singing, local classical music, sort of limps along, but there has been a lot of lively music and dance production, and the most overt example of that is this whole Chutney phenomenon, which really flourishes in the 70s and 80s.

S.M.: Let’s get to that in a second, but since you brought up the political side, in Guyana what do the Burnham years and the Burnham dictatorship do to the music and culture on the Indian side?

P.M.: Guyana is in some ways similar to Trinidad. You have the Afro-Caribbeans and the East Indians, the two big ethnic groups. Things became particularly different in the early 60s when the British gave independence to the colonies in the West Indies, and things didn’t go so well in Guyana. There, as in Trinidad, the political parties formed along ethnic lines, so you’d have a Black party and an Indian party. And in Guyana the person who was coming into power was this Cheddi Jagan, who was the leader of the Indian party. He was also a fervent anti-imperialist and Washington, D.C. and the British didn’t like that, so basically he was ousted and this Forbes Burnham was put in, and who was, at least rhetorically, a leftist. But in many ways he represented his own particular community. At any rate, there was ethnic discrimination against Indians, or at least they felt it existed. That was one thing, but probably more important was that he basically bankrupted the country. And we’re talking about the 60s, 70s, 80s. He dies but the party continues until the early nineties, and so there was very little production of any sort of commercial popular music, whether cassettes or records -- mass media. Real sort of cultural stagnation happened, and it’s terribly unfortunate. A lot of musicians, a lot of Guyanese left, both Black and Indian. So it was just not a conducive atmosphere for musical innovation. So folksongs, Chowtal, things like that limped along but it was really Trinidad that had a much more lively scene. That’s where, for example, this whole Chutney phenomenon really picked up in the 70s and 80s, really giving them and others the impression that they invented it, which is probably too strong.

S.M.: So let’s talk about Chutney. What is that?

P.M.: Ok, well, Chutney. Historically, this would be a music that has its roots in women’s folksongs, such as would be sung as the mutteecore ceremony, or ritual, that I mentioned, or weddings songs, light, fast, rhythmic songs. Let’s say it might have its roots in some North Indian wedding song, sung in the Bhojpuri region at weddings. The men at various occasions are having their own fun, drinking, dancing, singing their own songs; maybe they have some professional musicians. But at certain points in the wedding, the women, especially of the bride’s family, might sing various sorts of songs amongst themselves. And maybe one is playing the dholak, that’s the barrel drum, and they’re singing these fast songs in Bhojpuri Hindi. Sometimes with very spicy, ribald lyrics, making fun of the groom, even of his private parts. Some of them would be very lewd and humorous. And then women are also getting up and dancing. There are no men around so they don’t have to worry about being blasphemous or shaming the family. It’s just women off perhaps in a field or in some house. Although we’re talking about farm communities, definitely, but they can also dance in a lively and sort of sexy style.

Ok, this tradition gets brought to the Caribbean, it is definitely thriving in Guyana and Trinidad. And at a certain point, certainly from the 50’s and 60’s, they started calling these songs in Suriname and Trinidad Chutney, which then comes the generic term for any sort of light, catchy, fast song, especially these women’s songs. What happens, in terms of its transformation into a pop genre, it’s not so much a musical development, but rather that it literally comes out of the closet, and that seems to have happened mostly in Trinidad in a series of stages, perhaps in the 60’s. These women are dancing in some hot and stuffy room at a Trinidadian wedding, and meanwhile outside there is a tent set up and the men in the neighborhood, well, the neighbors, maybe even some local Afro-Trinidadian people, whatever, are drinking, dancing, having fun, and the women are saying, Why do we have to be stuck here in this room, all our friends and family are out there, why can’t we just go sing our songs out there. And gradually it comes to be something that is done at weddings, perhaps with the women themselves playing the drums, or perhaps they bring some professional musicians, maybe men, who sing these same songs or songs in the same style, perhaps accompanying themselves again on the dholak, the duntaw which is this metal rod, and the harmonium which is this accordion-like instrument. That is the most popular melodic instrument in North India as well as the Caribbean. So the singer is sitting on the ground, singing and accompanying himself on this little accordion-like keyboard with his right hand and pumping it with his left hand.

Ok, so this then comes to be called Chutney at a certain point, and it seems to have started in Suriname where these folk traditions are particularly lively because the Surinamese still speak Hindi. I think it was in the early 60’s, someone produced a record of this elderly Surinamese woman named Dropati, singing these sorts of songs. And that record spread around in Trinidad, and people liked it a lot even if they knew some of these songs. But it somehow gave a sort of a new incentive to popularize these songs. Then the next step would seem to have happened more in the – oh, I think also in the 70’s I think some people organized a tour of Dropati – so this music was sort of being recognized as something that can be performed in public as well as women just singing it amongst themselves.

Then it seems to be in the 80’s that, perhaps in response to popular demand, Trinidadian women and some men, they are now used to doing this sort of thing at weddings, singing these songs or you have a little group that sings them, they dance around, maybe men with men, women with women, men with women, or just everyone in this crowded space doing it themselves, doing it together in their own way. A traditional Bhojpuri style of dancing, and it’s derived from this Windham style, a lot of hips, but also these graceful hand and arm gestures, sort of like you might get in flamenco or Middle-Eastern dancing, and very sort of bawdy and sexy. Which is funny because it is a socially conservative community, but it’s this tradition that came straight out of the closet, and women could do these songs and be as sexy as they like, there’s no men around, and then taking it out of that context, into public.

Getting back to this next step that happens in the 80’s, they’re deciding, “Oh, we’re having so much fun dancing at these weddings. Why do we have to wait for the occasional wedding in the neighborhood? There isn’t another wedding for another two months. Why can’t we just have events, fêtes, where these are done?” And so, it was particularly one family of entrepreneurs that started holding these public Chutney dances. They would hire a band to come; band meaning, again, meaning harmonium, dholak, duntal, and singer, with a noisy PA system. And this would be in a big, open-air theater sort of thing with some sort of covering because it rains a lot, and they would have a lot of plastic folding chairs and people sit and chat, and then when the music gets hot, they get up and dance. And this was very controversial in the Indian community, because people said this was disgraceful, our women should be upholding our traditional – they’re supposed to be our queens of the hearth and all that shame and honor. And it’s ok for men to dance around but for women to do this, this is unacceptable, and this whole sort of polemic erupted in newspapers, talk shows, and so on. But basically the conservatives were shouted down, or danced down and these Chutney fêtes became very popular. Every weekend you have them in Trinidad, and it’s spread now to Guyana, and there are Chutney clubs here in New York City as well. The next step was the sort of creolization of this music.

S.M.: So, as we get to that, we have been doing the classic thing of talking about this Indo-Caribbean – we’ve been doing the two cylinders, right, there’s the Indian cylinder and the Afro-Caribbean cylinder, which we haven’t been talking about. And of course, there’s a dynamic here, right. Can you – to what extent was Indo-Caribbean culture maybe in the mid-20th century, or just as we come up to the period you’re discussing now, to what extent was it developing in isolation from Afro-Caribbean culture, and to what extent not?

P.M.: Yeah, a lot of it would be very much in isolation. Let’s take Chowtal, which is this springtime folksong I described. It has nothing to do with creole, or Afro-Caribbean culture. Women’s folksongs, bhajans, film songs, this whole gamut of music that is thoroughly hooked into India, whether it’s an ancestral tradition or whether it’s something that’s coming out of Bollywood. Of course, a lot of the Bollywood music is very Westernized, which is a whole other contradictory wrinkle in this whole situation. But, well we could mention tassa drumming, which I talked about a little bit. It’s this thunderously loud drum ensemble; these big heavy barrel drums called dhol, maybe three or four of them, these medium-sized drums called fuller -- and they think that’s because it fills out the sound, it makes it more full. But in fact it seems more likely that that term comes from Fula, which is a West African term. It is also a name that pops up here and there in the Caribbean as a kind of drum.

Then there is the tassa drum itself, or a couple of them. This is a little kettle drum, maybe about sixteen inches across and it hangs around your neck, it hangs about at waist-level, and the player, there will be three or four of them perhaps, they play them with these sticks and you can play these very fast, these rhythms, you know, brrrr-rat-tat-tat-tat-tat, these very fast rolls. This is purely out of Indian tradition. The whole ensemble is called tassa, and that particular drum is also called tassa. Or they call it “the cutter.” Why? Because it cuts through. But this is another situation like fuller, it seems like it probably comes from kata, or at least was reinforced by that, which is West African and Caribbean drum name. At any rate, what about the rhythms that they play on tassa? Many of them seem to come straight out of India. But then there are others that have names like dingolay or steel pan or whatever and that are clearly tassa versions of Afro-Caribbean music.

S.M.: So is it fair to say that, up to a certain point the main area in which there might have been a sort of implicit conversation between the two communities musically was at the level of rhythm and percussion?

P.M.: Perhaps it might be. Now, keep in mind, let’s say we’re talking about Trinidad; what are the big creole musics there? Calypso is a seasonal thing, and if we’re talking about the mid-20th century, or even nowadays, calypso is mostly a creole or Afro-Trinidadian thing. Indians have never been really that interested in participating in it, and perhaps not even listening to it, and very often they’re made fun of in the tradition in calypsos, even nowadays. So, that’s not really going to influence them musically that much. Then steel band is also mostly an Afro-Caribbean, Afro-Trinidadian thing. Not entirely, of course, and perhaps the most famous steel band arranger in Trinidad nowadays, or for the last couple decades, is (Gene Sumahu?), an Indian guy. And you have school bands and so on and anyone can play in them, you certainly have East Indians that are apt at that. But mostly, and especially in its origins, it comes from lower class slums, you can say, off the Port of Spain, Afro-Trinidadian communities.

S.M.: So there’s an urban and rural thing going on here as well, isn’t there?

P.M.: Yeah. We’re talking about the creole influence, such as it existed in East Indian Trinidadian music culture, would not pertain to things like the famous genres of calypso and steel band which would be mostly Afro-Trinidadian things. Sure lots of East Indians, older ones that I interviewed in the 90’s, they were crazy about Rudy Vallee, or whatever, popular American or Afro-American singers of the 30’s and 40’s, and some of them would even sing those songs. They had their ears open to things, but it didn’t necessarily become so much a part of their own music culture. What did have a big influence was – I mean I mentioned Chutney, not so much in terms of music style, or even dance style – although people look at sort of the pneumatic hip gyration and think that must have come from Afro-Trinidadian dancing, but I don’t think that’s necessarily the case. You see plenty of that in Indian folk dancing. What changed was the idea that it was gradually considered acceptable to do this in public, men and women dancing together. And I’m sure you would have Indian men and women in the 50’s, the 60’s, looking at Afro-Trinidadians dancing and having so much fun and thinking, “Gee, why can’t we do that too?”

And then the whole idea of having competitions; you have calypso competitions from, you know, the 1910’s and 20’s. This caught on in Indian music making in various ways: Tan singing or local classical music competitions, and then especially from the 70’s you have this big amateur song competition. It’s like American Idol and this is, you know, Indo-Trinidadian idol, and mostly singing film songs and so on; but very popular, very widespread, and originally patterned in structure and form on the calypso competitions.

S.M.: What about the reverse? Was there any injection of Indian material, or Indian rhythms, or Indian performative stuff or whatever into Afro-Trinidadian and Afro-Guyanese music?

P.M.: The biggest example of that would be in the realm of Soca. Some listeners will know something about the history of Soca, but this is really in the late 70’s. Lord Shorty, who is a calypso singer, and is generally credited, and it seems quite clear that he did invent the genre, with some help, felt that Trinidad needed its own dance music the same way Jamaica had. Why should they always have to listen to Reggae or whatever, and calypso is not really a dance music. So he came up with this Soca rhythm in collaboration with another musician. And, of course, the Soca rhythm is going Dum-ch-dum-ch, Dum-ch-dum-ch. He himself was a sort of friend of East Indians, always had one ear tuned into East Indian culture. And he claimed that it was at least in part inspired by East Indian drumming. Now it’s hard to put one’s finger exactly on what he was referring to, but he was very explicit about this. That it was inspired – and you certainly, you hear rhythms that are compatible. I mean, the most typical Indian and North Indian and Indo-Caribbean folk rhythm is something like doot-k-dit-k-dum, doot-k-dit-k-dum, which is certainly compatible, and they do all sorts of variations which might have inspired him to create this Soca rhythm.

And then of course, that takes on this whole life of its own and Soca becomes this hugely popular genre, and not just in Trinidad, but all over the Caribbean as well. And then what happens in, I guess we’re talking about the early 90’s, getting back to the Chutney side of things, Chutney is now a big phenomenon in the East Indian community, very popular, Chutney dances and fêtes all over the place. And the music also creolizing to some extent, becoming performed more and more by what you could say dance bands, electrified instruments. Instead of playing harmonium you have someone playing synthesizer. And dholak, it’s hard to amplify it, so it was much easier to do it on a drum machine, and they could either imitate the dholak rhythm on a drum machine or play a Soca rhythm, you just press the Soca button. And then you have Dum-ch-dum-ch, Dum-ch-dum-ch, and singing the traditional Chutney melodies over this, and this is what came to be called Chutney Soca. Which is this now tremendously popular genre among Indo-Caribbeans, and also quite a few Afro-Caribbeans like it, or will dance to it. If you’re at club in Port of Spain, and they’re mostly putting on Beanie Man or Soca and then they put on a Chutney Soca, everyone will go on dancing to it if they are East Indian or black. It’s ironic that it was, at least according to Shorty, inspired by East Indian rhythms to begin with to some extent. But now they have sort of melded this way, and Chutney Soca is this very sort of natural blending of these two streams.

S.M.: And you mentioned the arrival of electronics, and drum machine, synthesizer and all of that; and I guess there’s always the dichotomy of that it always takes away from traditional instrumentation, but it also enables more and more people to be involved with the music, to hear it. It disseminates, right?

P.M.: Yeah, so as Chutney Soca becomes popular within the Indian community -- this is mostly in the early 90’s -- it was controversial. You would have traditional musicians who, first of all they liked local classical music more, and they would be upset that at every wedding, every party would turn into a Chutney fête with people dancing wildly, and falling down. And the music, instead of being these sophisticated, a little more austere sounding thumris and dhrupads now it was these simple and bouncy Chutney songs. At any rate, Chutney sort of took over the scene, both whether we’re talking about weddings or popular dances. But it would be in the 80’s and early 90’s mostly a classic ensemble of let’s say harmonium, dholak, duntaw. For whatever reasons, by the early 90’s this is being replaced by synthesizer, and, well, drum machine programmed into the synthesizer, maybe a duntal, but more of a sort of a band like that, perhaps with electric bass, maybe guitar. And it was controversial. Also, the singers are now singing more and more in English, because they run out of old Hindi words, they don’t understand Hindi anymore, or maybe they mix up Hindi and English. So you had a big argument in the Indian community that we’re losing our Indian tradition. At least with the old Chutney songs, we had base in traditional folk culture, but then other people are saying, “No, the music has to change. If you just go on doing the same old songs then young people won’t be interested.” So Chutney Soca is a way of keeping them interested in Indian culture in a modernized fashion. And I think there is much to be said for that point of view.

And so what is Chutney Soca now? It is usually a typical Indian, and specifically Bhojpuri, style melody, a lot of which are really simple. I mean, this is not like a Ravi Shankar improvisation on sitar, it’s [SINGS]. Very simple melodies like that, nowadays singing it in English or a little bit of Hindi, sometimes singing little vignettes about Indian social life. And so often, instead of the very traditional Indian style rhythm that you would hear on the dholak, which would be doot-k-dit-k-dum, doot-k-dit-k-dum, instead you hear Dum-ch-dum-ch, Dum-ch-dum-ch, which is more the Soca rhythm. So, as with any musical innovation, you have people who like it or don’t like it, but certainly young people love it. It’s very popular in clubs; people like to dance to it. And people will come dance any style they like; it might look like Soca dancing, but again, sometimes, as far as I’m concerned, and I’m not the only one, the best dancers are the old women because they can do it in this very lively, and you could even say sexy Indian folk style.  

S.M.: So, situate for me – this is a change of topic here, but a very important one – the role that New York City, and also Toronto, perhaps – there’s this huge double diaspora, right? I mean, the Guyanese and Trinidadian communities here are enormous, aren’t they? And they’re probably quite significant as a percentage of the total number of Guyanese and Trinidadians, both Afro- and Indo- that are anywhere in the world. What’s going on here in New York vis-à-vis these musics?

P.M.: Well certainly there’s a very lively production scene. There are commercial recordings, although I would say it’s not such a recording-based, or recording-driven music as let’s say reggae or dancehall reggae is. But certainly on Liberty Avenue in Queens you can find plenty of stores with modern CDs and so on produced here in New York City. I’m sure there’s more production that goes on here than you would find in Guyana.

S.M.: Do people come from Guyana and Trinidad to record and sort of make their musical professional life in New York?

P.M.: Certainly if a Guyanese wants to record, yeah, I don’t think there’s much happening in Guyana unless things have changed in the last few years, but as with the 90’s there was nothing happening at all, and I think it’s been slow to change. Trinidad would have some recording studios. But, certainly there’s a circuit now, and musicians are coming back and forth between let’s say Trinidad, New York City, Toronto, even Miami. I know some musicians there constantly traveling back and forth. Maybe you might say because there is a finite audience in each one of those places. But the musicians and their accompanists keep rotating and going back and forth, you have festivals in one place or another. So, certainly there is a lively scene. I’m not sure if there are particular developments that are happening here that are not happening elsewhere, for example Trinidad, but I could be wrong. Certainly you have collaborations; you might have a dancehall reggae singer with an Indo-Trinidadian musician. There are various sorts of fusions like that. And you have a lot of young Indo-Trinidadians and Indo-Guyanese who are very tuned into dancehall and do their own versions of that. Sometimes with Indian rhythms or whatever, sort of self-conscious fusions. People are very cosmopolitan and open-minded in that way.

S.M.: So is there a New York style, or a New York approach to making Indo-Caribbean music? Whether at the level of the classical forms or the level of the pop stuff?

P.M.: Not that I know of. I don’t think so, unless something’s happening just very recently.

S.M.: And it is a similar situation in Toronto? Is New York really the epicenter for these communities, outside of their actual countries of origin?

P.M.: I think Toronto is a pretty lively scene. I went up there about ten years ago and they had their own host of local classical musicians, both Trinidadians and Guyanese, some you know Chutney clubs, that sort of thing. Very similar, maybe a little bit smaller.

S.M.: You’ve mentioned some of the people, you know you’ve made kind of passing references to people you know here, events that you go to here, the event on Long Island that you were describing just now. So is there kind of an economy, an immigrant economy. Does it support or sustain some population of musicians, I guess, through these events, through weddings and other ceremonies, through club performances and all that kind of thing?

P.M.: Yeah, and that has grown a lot. I mean, when I started going to Trinidad and Guyana in the early 90’s, this whole Chutney scene was really just getting off the ground. I mean I have cassettes where the people who would subsequently become stars, some of the songs they’re singing ads to the Tire King and Stag Beer, and these guys are having day jobs, they are policemen or whatever. As of, you know, the late 90’s, the music had gotten so popular that they had quit their day jobs, they were full time Chutney singers, they were touring around Trinidad, Guyana, again, New York, Miami, Toronto, whatever circuit. So that scene has really become much more remunerative and self-sustaining. Meanwhile these amateur song competitions which are patronized by East Indian businesses, those were a big thing.

Even in the realm of traditional music – one of my closest friends and informants in the Indo-Guyanese community here, a very brilliant drummer named Rudy Sakes Narayan, he used to work in a hospital. He injured his back, this would have been at least six or eight years ago, and was unable to work. This was clearly a set back, but in the mean time he has found himself constantly in demand as a dholak player, because he is a virtuoso. Not necessarily in this pop-Chutney scene at all, but rather for pujas, that is, prayer sessions, weddings, different sorts of contexts in which they want traditional music, and so they will have singers as well, but he has a reputation as a very knowledgeable and skilled drummer. He’s a young guy, maybe 40 or so, and he is constantly flying down to Guyana or Curaçao, or even Los Angeles or Toronto. Wherever you have these pockets of Indian communities and they will hire him to come and drum at a wedding.

So, I don’t want to say it’s a wealthy community but it’s not completely impoverished either, they are sort of working class. And, yes, some of these traditions are declining, but you have a lot of interest in maintaining religion, and to do that properly you have these day-long prayer sessions or whatever, what would be called a puja, and a lot of that is the pundit holding forth for hours, and people are sitting under a tent or whatever, but then it should turn into a song session. There should be traditional music for that of one sort or another. You can have just some local person who can play a little bit on the drum, but if you want to do it properly, you spend some money and you get a really good drummer. And so there are, there’s a circuit of musicians, yeah. And some of them are real virtuosos.

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