Among the Believers

Trinidad is a very religious country.  It's also very British.  These two things interact in strange ways that I'm only beginning to understand.

I didn't think this was a particularly British country at first.  In fact, I made the mistake of telling that to a proudly patriotic and most un-British middle-aged Trini individual. 

Oh boy did I get a talking-to.  First, the proper term here is "English."  You can refer to "Britain" and "British" until you're blue in the face, and they'll come back with "England" and "English."  This is especially true of the Hewitt family, who have traced their last name back to a Scotsman who came to Barbados in the 1840s and married a local woman. (His children moved to Trinidad.)  "We were both colonized by wankers," explained a film buff who also shared Scottish ancestry.

Second, it was pointed out to me—at great length and with no small amount of passion—that the "English" heritage lives on.  The school system.  The uniformed kids.  The parliamentary government.  The Privy Council.  The driving on the wrong side of the road.  The architecture.  Cricket.  Soccer.  (Although by that last count, Bolivia has a strong English heritage.)  And the blurry line between the churches and the state. 

Consider the Hindu temple in Waterloo, on a pier extending into the Gulf of Paria.  It's at the end of a road that passes by suburban bungalows on one side and an abandoned sugar fields—probably slated to become future bungalows—on the other.  The entrance to the temple's parking lot is marked by a modest statue of Sewdass Sadhu, the grocery-store owner who in 1947 built the original temple on the site of what's now a parking lot. 

More below the fold.

Trinidad not being a Latin American country, the government promptly came by and bulldozed it.  So Sadhu decided to rebuild the thing out to sea, rolling in steel drums and concrete rings and all sorts of trash to construct the foundation, a sort of a poor man's landfill.  No regulations governing that, although nature's laws took over where Trinidad's said nothing, and the tide kept washing out the foundation. 

Sadhu, who’d come to Trinidad as a four-year-old in 1904, died in 1971.  Almost a quarter-century later, in 1995, with the United National Congress inside spitting distance of winning the upcoming election, the PNM government declared the site of his temple an official Unemployment Relief Project.  That didn't help the PNM win the election, but the UNC wasn't about to withdraw funding for a project popular among Indo-Trinidadians.  They finished the temple.  In memory of Sadhu's sisyphean efforts they left some concrete tubes lying around in the site, although they pretty much look like trash. 

We visited during a funeral.  A double funeral, actually: a husband had caught his wife in flagrante, killed her, and then killed himself.  No word on what happened to the other gentleman.  There were certainly a lot of attendees, although I imagine that the conversation must have been a little stilted.  I will say, though, that I now understand the attraction of open cremation. 

(An unfortunate aside:  in August, vandals damaged some of the statues inside the temple.  Condemation was universal.) 

The Waterloo Temple illustrates how Trinidad and its English heritage left three stamps on Hinduism. 

First, caste distinctions have faded.  According to the office of the Raj's "Protector of Emigrants," 14.3% of the emigrants were "high caste," against 34.9% "low."  You would think that would be enough to replicate the hierarchy in the New World, but it didn't happen.  The plantations' skewed sex-ratios undermined traditional caste relations by forcing intermarriage.  At the same time, most of the low-caste emigrants became fee-simple smallholders after their indenture expired, which further turned the traditional hierarchy on its head. 

This isn't to say that caste completely disappeared — that only happens when Indo-Trinidadians move to Queens Village, become Trinidadian-Americans, and marry Italians from Long Island.  (Aside:  if you believe that the QSV 11427 on the Lincoln's license plate means anything, then Vincent Chase happens to be from Queens Village.  The episode writes itself, people!  Come on.  Rihanna could have a cameo.)

A 1991 survey showed that self-proclaimed Brahmins dominated among Indo-Trinidadian politicians, emphasis on self-proclaimed.  The same poll also showed that Indo-Trinidadians actually approved of inter-caste marriage — in contrast to their overwhelmingly negative attitude about marriage to Afro-Trinidadians.   (Marrying white people, though, that was okay.)  That negativity hasn’t stopped the number of inter-racial marriages from steadily rising, but it stands in contrast to the laid-back attitude towards caste. 

Second, temples are congregational.  Consider the picture that opened this post.  It's the new Hanuman temple in Chaguanas.  The community funded it from thousands of private donations, importing masons from India to do the detail work, and capping it all off with a 75-foot-tall stone statue of the monkey god himself. 

The roots of Hindu congregationalism—that's not my coinage—go back to the 19th and early 20th century.  As villages formed around smallholders who received their own plots upon finishing their indentures, communities would organize celebrations, puja (the offerings to various deities), and other religious gatherings.  Ironically, congregationalism strengthened the importance of the Brahmin priesthood exactly as it helped destroy most of what remained of the caste's social pretenses in other contexts.

Finally, life on the island stripped away a lot of the subcontinental cultural baggage, leaving the Hindu religious core behind.  Arranged marriages, for example, pretty much went the way of the dodo back in the 1950s.  (As with so many things, some older Trinidadians pin this on what people call the "American occupation" during WW2 and the early decades of the Cold War.)  Nowadays, an arranged marriage would be greeted with as much incomprehension here as it would in Puerto Rico.  Ditto, a traditional Hindu wedding dance has been transformed into a rather lacivious public gyration that would do Christina Aguilera proud.  (People riot in India over public displays of much less.)  A more informed account can be found here. 

Of course, the religion was also weakened in the transition.  You see a lot of Indo-Trinidadians chomping down on the cow.  Oh, beef-eating is far from universal among the nominal Hindus of this island, but their relationship with beef isn't unlike the relationship that American Jews — or American Hindus, for that matter — have with verbotten meat products.  Hindus here pick-and-choose what they like about their cultural heritage, and discard what they don’t. 

I find this all very cool.  My one regret is that because the Indo-Trinidadian and Afro-Trinidadian communities are still fairly separate, I haven’t found as many opportunities as I'd've liked to see Indo-Trinidadian culture from the inside. 

Does anyone have more knowledge?  I find my own woefully lacking.

Comments

[Shanta]

What else would you like to know about the Indian culture?
There is actually a very strong adherence to the Hindu religion here but it is never brought the the forefront of indian culture in Trinidad and that is why you came to the conclusion that we pick and choose what we like about the religion.

For some unknown reason the chutney music and all that goes along with it is promoted far more than the religion when it comes to indian culture.
I think Indo-Trinidadians greatest loss however is our language and this was literally only lost in the last 40 years. My grandmother is fluent in Hindi but her children cannot speak a word of it. This is because her children grew up when colonialism was on its last legs yet in order for them to go to a good school they had to speak english fluently. Thus english was the only language spoken within the household. I wish I could speak hindi. I shall hopefully learn it one day and finally be able to watch those Bollywood movies I love so much without having to read the subtitles and eventually teach it to my future children someday.