Memory Beyond Black Waters: Mapping History, Language and Culture in Kalapani Poetics from the Perspective of Female Indentureship

The transoceanic voyage of Indian women, who left the shores of India as indentured labourers generations ago (in)voluntarily, created space for hybrid sites of linguistic and cultural interaction, transmission, production, and representation across the Kalapani in the twentieth/twenty-first century. The Kalapani poetics is constructed along the memories of the first-generation female emigrants whose exilic trajectories their second/third/fourth-generation descendants revisit in their writings. That language is a powerful medium for the transmission/translation of memory is as true as the intervention of memory for transporting language and culture to new lands. Ancestral memory significantly serves as an archive that enables the descendants of the Indian indentured female emigrants to excavate the indentureship experiences from the sites of amnesia and point to redress their historical exclusion. This chapter will explore the writings of Ramabai Espinet, Peggy Mohan, Gaiutra Bahadur and other writers who imaginatively recollect the sounds and stories of Ramayana, Calypso, matikor, Chutney music and songs in Bhojpuri, Awadhi or other regional languages from India, sung by their indentured grandmothers beyond the black waters; these grandmothers reinvented the cultural linguistics of their host land and emerged as emissaries of their homeland culture and language across the Kalapani. The pages of their writings resonate with the diasporic memories of Indo-Caribbean indentured female migrants positing new ways of reading and recording the hybridity inherent in their identities and subjecthood, thus reconstructing space for historiography of female indentureship. There shall be a focus here on how language and culture travelled to faraway lands along the transoceanic memory of the indentured migrant women creating grounds for the linguistic-cultural syncretism embedded in the songs and music, prayers and folklore, myths and epics.