that while this might be true to a certain extent, these carnival aspects are not new elements in the Trinidadian variant of the rite because similar occasions for festive behavior were already noticeable in India and even in Iran. This is not to say, however, that the nature of the observance’s outward appearance is uncontested in these countries. Indeed, the same sorts of ideological debate that emerge in Trinidad each year as Hosay approaches find expression in India and Iran as well.
The craftsmen and others associated with the forty-day preparation of Hosay do not condone the merrymaking on the streets during the public processions. Nonetheless, the historical transformation of muḥarram from a predominantly solemn observance to a public celebration is a distinctive process on the island. It marks the event as a characteristic form of Trinidadian performance. Through it, East Indians participate in Creole culture, but they also reassert their own Indian ethnic identity by performing a tradition that is perceived to have come to Trinidad from India in an unaltered state. The various uses and understandings of tradition as something unchanging and frozen in time are a vehicle for the ongoing negotiation of ethnicity in a relatively new and multicultural nation-state.
The theme of identity politics is addressed most forcefully in Chapter 6, where I argue that the Hosay phenomenon manifests multiple discourses about national culture, race, and ethnic identity on the island. The domains of these discourses can best be visualized as a series of concentric circles starting from the center and radiating outward like the proverbial ripples on a pond. In his study of the naven ritual among the Iatmul of New Guinea, Gregory Bateson mentions that they also see the world and all its inhabitants as ripples and waves on the surface of water: “It is said secretly that men, pigs, trees, grass—all the objects in the world—are only patterns of waves.… On one occasion I took some Iatmul natives down to the coast and found one sitting by himself gazing with rapt attention at the sea.… He was gazing at the waves which were heaving and breaking when no wind was blowing, demonstrating the truth of his clan’s myth.”15 Like Bateson’s Iatmul friend, I too sat gazing pensively, but at a different ocean, with a friend in Trinidad as he wondered what India, the imaginary homeland of his ancestors, was like. I imagine ripples bursting out in concentric rings around my friends in Trinidad to connect them religiously and culturally with ever widening social circles. The image allows for the conceptualization of how the global becomes incorporated into the local. Roland Robertson cleverly refers to the process as one of “glocalization,” which is a subtle blend of the local and the global.16
In Trinidad the rituals are at the center personal and subjective. From this subjective core, we move to the kinship unit or family circle within which ritualistic and customary activities occur in the esoteric, private realm of the “yard” compound. From here we move out to the tertiary ring of the small community of Shi‘i worshippers on the island. In a largely Shi‘i-populated country such as Iran, one would expect the circular ripples to end here, but Trinidad, being a polyethnic island, offers further ripples to consider. From the circle of the community of Shi‘i worshippers, we move to the public or exoteric sphere of the fourth circle, which is the ethnic domain. It is on this level of discourse that non-Shi‘i Indo-Trinidadians may claim the esoteric rite as a secular Indian pageant. Next comes the circle of the nation-state. As more and more Trinidadians of non-Indian descent become involved in the public display and performance of the Hosay rituals, the spectacle moves from the ethnic to the national realm. If we are to place Hosay in a transnational context, however, we need to engulf the inner circles with a globally constituted one that connects the innermost three spheres to the all-encompassing outer circle. Within this larger sphere of concentric circles, Caribbean Shi‘i Muslims become part of a worldwide community of worshippers, for better or for worse. The fairly recent impact of orthodox Shi‘i missionary activity on the island is the subject for my closing reflections in the epilogue on ideological challenges confronting Hosay participants after more than 150 years of residency.
In deploying the metaphor of ripples on a pond, I do not envision a seamless stream of harmonious continuity emanating from a quiet center. Rather, we may wish to imagine another pebble dropped at the periphery, which would lead to a collision between the rings bursting forth from the center and those moving inward from the periphery. This more complicated picture is more consonant with the quote from James Clifford that opened this Introduction. The image of colliding concentric rings offers an opportunity to look deeper at the contentions that have surrounded the event over time and across space.
The discourses revolving around issues of pious observance versus antinomian celebration and ethnic pageant versus national culture are serious points of contention in Trinidad, and it is through the discourses surrounding these debates that meanings and identities are negotiated on various levels. I argue that the levels of discourse described above can be identified very clearly. Essentially, the above circles can be reduced to three. On the most intimate level, the Shi‘i families who lovingly nurture the Hosay observance collectively preserve the most esoteric (bāṭin) and symbolic level of the ritual complex’s meaning. On the secondary level of Indo-Trinidadian ethnicity, Indians of other religious persuasions perpetuate the idea of Hosay as an Indian “cultural performance,” in Milton Singer’s term, divorced from its esoteric and sacred meanings.17 Finally, on the tertiary level of the nation-state, non-Indian Trinidadians (most significantly those of African descent) see the performance as a purely secular and exoteric (ẓāhir) Trinidadian event with close parallels to the island’s famous Carnival.18 What I want to suggest is that the terminology used for the event, as well as the social organization of the yards within which the tadjahs are built, exemplifies the Caribbean nature of the performance quite well, providing ample evidence for cultural creolization. Having posited this, however, it is equally important to underscore the remarkable continuities that one finds as a result of the odyssey from Iran to India to Trinidad. These continuities suggest to me a cultural strategy of what the linguist Derek Bickerton calls decreolization along a pidgin/creole continuum.
Decreolization, as I use the term here, allows Indo-Trinidadians to resist the totalizing effects of creolization by consciously identifying concepts in Afro-Trinidadian culture to parallel their own Indic-inspired ones as a method of tolerance and accommodation. Bickerton, following Langacker, speaks of linguistic change in the process of decreolization proceeding through a phase of reanalysis during which “no overt change in surface structure occurs but the underlying structure is re-interpreted.”19 I do not assume, however, that changes in the expressive culture of Indo-Trinidadians are unidirectional in favor of the dominant social class. For as Christine Jourdan warns, “if decreolization means a move in the direction of a standard, it does not mean … a loss of other varieties” because “not all changes in creoles are in the direction of the acrolect.”20 Rather, actors in public ritual drama have a repertoire of options from which to choose, depending on the situational context of their performances, which allows for a relatively free flow of ideas in both directions. My findings argue against a movement toward standardization defined by the dominant class, and they are supported by Kean Gibson’s recent study of Comfa religion and Creole language in Guyana.21 Gibson draws upon the work of Robert LePage and Andrée Tabouret-Keller and shares my interest in developing a multidimensional approach that acknowledges the coexistence of more than one linguistic or religious system operating within any given polyethnic society.22
By applying the above linguistic model of culture viewed through a ritualistic lens, I aim to move beyond the binaries of extreme retentionism and extreme creolization, two positions that have plagued Caribbean anthropological debates.23 In so doing, I am in agreement with Stuart Hall when he suggests that diasporic traditions retain strong links with their places of origin without harboring the illusion of any possibility of returning to the past. As he writes, “They are not and never will be unified in the old sense, because they are inevitably the products of several interlocking histories and cultures, belonging at the same time to several ‘homes’—and thus to no particular home.”24 Hall’s comment very clearly suggests that diasporic citizens
