Much of the scholarly literature on Caribbean identity and expressive culture has focused on the African diaspora to the near exclusion of the Indian presence. In Trinidad the world-renowned traditions of carnival, steel band, and calypso music elide the fact that people of African descent comprise only 39.3 percent of the population; a slightly greater percentage are of Indian descent. In Creating Their Own Space, Tina Ramnarine provides an important corrective to this bias by focusing on chutney music in Trinidad and its significant role in shaping Indian-Caribbean identity. Although Ramnarine historicizes “diasporized conditions,” she effectively locates the production of “Indianness” in contemporary performance practices shaped by national cultural politics in Trinidad in tension with transnational communities and music markets.

Methodologically, Ramnarine approaches her topic as both an ethnomusicologist and a social anthropologist, but I found her musical analysis to be more compelling than her social analysis. Because there are few archival records and no sound recordings of early Indian-Caribbean music, she traces the history of chutney by collecting diverse oral histories from both Trinidad and Guyana. Ramnarine agrees with the commonly held position that chutney music emerged from the female musical and ritual space of the Mathkor ceremony in Indian weddings. By the 1980s, however, chutney became secularized and popularized largely by male Indian singers who drew on the fast, “spicy” beat. In chapter 2, “Making the Music,” Ramnarine discusses the musical elements of chutney, including lyrical content, instrumentation, and song structure. Rather than focusing on historical authenticity or debates about cultural retention, Ramnarine describes traditional instruments as “symbols of ‘Indianness’” (p. 68), specifically the drum, the percussion instruments called the dholak and the dhantal, and the harmonium, a French instrument disseminated by colonial powers in India. Contemporary chutney music may also include electronic drums, keyboards, brass, English lyrics, and themes of partying or wining (dancing), all of which create semiotic affinity with Afro-Caribbean soca music, thus generating much controversy.

Ramnarine rightly identifies debates about “authenticity” as crucial to new constructions of a Caribbean “Indianness” in a context in which “being ‘Indian’ serves both to remind Indian-Caribbeans of their ancestry and to further local political debates and interests” (p. 10). Ramnarine, however, provides little analysis of the national context and elides the seriousness of definition in Trinidadian society, as perceptions of Indian and African cultural traditions become polarized within volatile racialist and nationalist discourse. The movement of chutney into the public sphere parallels the broader ascendancy of Indians into the center of political life in Trinidad, with the election of the first “Indian” government in 1995 and subsequent sweeping changes in official national cultural policy. Moreover, the privatization of media in the 1990s fostered a number of new “Indian” radio stations, generally viewed by the black population as a threat to their own cultural and political hegemony. A final point here concerns Ramnarine’s avoidance of the term race throughout her book. Whereas the difference between “race” and “ethnicity” remains ambiguous in much anthropological literature, in Trinidad race is the commonly employed term in public discourse as well as in social-science research (for example, at the Institute for Social and Economic Research at the University of the West Indies). Moreover, I would argue that the term race more effectively communicates constructions of difference in the highly contested domain of contemporary cultural politics.

Ramnarine draws on interviews with musicians as her primary data, but attending to the complexities and politics of reception would strengthen her analysis, especially in relation to national class interests. In the final two chapters, she discusses how the reception of chutney is highly contested even within the Indian population, as “some” see it as an important Indian-Caribbean expression, whereas “others” view this popular form as cultural degradation because of the its attendant suggestive dancing by young female performers. The indefinite quality of the word some leaves the reader wondering whether differences in reception are simply matters of personal taste. I would argue instead that this debate has a specific class component, which is highly significant in relation to Indian nationalist politics. Although Ramnarine cites the Hindu Women’s Association--a group that actively fosters high cultural forms like Indian classical music and dance--as a central opponent of chutney, she doesn’t adequately explain the significance of this and other organizations in terms of a specifically Indian (and Hindu) nation-building project. Ramnarine makes an important point about the gendered context of performance, but the debate about sexually suggestive dancing circulates within broader questions regarding the representation of Indo-Trinidadian culture.

My critique has focused on the national context; Ramnarine offers an interesting perspective on the transnational production of identity through musical dialogue by tracing chutney performance from Guyana and Trinidad to London, Toronto, New York, and even back to India. She effectively argues for “multivocality” in the development of postcolonial counternarratives and illustrates how music is a powerful, rapidly circulating medium shaping identity in the diaspora. Although the text includes some postcolonial theory, it is appropriate for undergraduates and may be useful in courses studying transnationalism, the Indian diaspora, race and ethnicity, global popular culture, and cultural nationalism.