Black Power was a response to Trinidad's economy remaining controlled by foreign interests, and the new black elite adopting habits of the old white elite. The movement reached out to Indians, but not convincingly. Whatever its original intentions, "Black Power" became "PNM Black Nationalism," and culture, race and politics fused in the national imagination. One could not be discussed without raising the others. This PNM's ethnic logic was outlined in James Alva Bain's article in the Guardian on April 25, 1976, "Time is running out for us.
" Afro-Trinidadians were debilitated by "an inherent prejudice against manual labour" and "a lack of aptitude of thrift and trading," while Indians were moving into the professions and the civil service. In other words: "the Indians taking over." By 1991, David Trotman, in "The Image of Indians in Calypso 1946-1986," concluded retrospectively that a resurgence of Indo ethnic pride would be "viewed by the African community as aggressiveness, aimed at...domination." Thus, post-independence cultural politics would erase Indo imagery from the "national" imagi- nation, save the derisive guest appearances in calypso.
And as the Indo media had disappeared post-1962, Indians entered a phase of protracted silence. This was accomplished because the one TV station (till 1991), few radio stations, and newspapers were nominally "free," but PNM aligned. (Apparently, the Indians' growing wealth and education did not apprise them of the need for a media presence.) Apropos, you'd think Carnival would be everywhere at this time -it wasn't. Till the mid-1990s Pan Trinbago and Tuco complained bitterly about "de cult-yere" being oppressed by ("Eurocentric") theatre, art galleries, classical music and dance.
Carnival was hot chicks from Poison, Harts and Barbarossa; mas' was Minshall's spectacle. Calypso was David Rudder's profound-sounding bumf which became anthems of the gauche PNM brown aristocracy, who despised their black brethren. The Indians were silent, but busy. Among the triggers for Bain's article were the book Calcutta to Caroni, published in 1974, and the first conference on Indians in the Caribbean, in 1975 at UWI. The book, wrote John La Guerre, was seen as a "conspiracy" and the conference was met with "resistance from the campus intelligentsia."
In 1979, an imbroglio erupted over Stalin's calypso, Caribbean Man, which, Ramesh Deosaran wrote (in India in the Caribbean), "provided a...snapshot of the social psychology of race relations." Stalin (some felt) had sung that Caribbean man was Afro-Carib-bean man. Some felt others were too racial and sensitive for pointing this out. Studying the newspapers' handling of the debate, Deosaran concluded they'd manipulated content to give precedence to the Afrocentric view. My analysis of (1986) newspapers showed that Indo culture accounted for four per cent of total articles. (Afro-Creole culture accounted for 12 per cent.)
A revealing study of Carnival done in this period (Trinidad Carnival, A Quest for National Identity, by Peter van Koningsbruggen) would comment that "The Indians do not count" (p108). The author observed the Afro-Trini- dadian attitude to VS Naipaul (a metonym for Indo-Trinidad) in a local newspaper article quoting Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka as saying "ignore VS Naipaul." This was reassurance to Creole society that "black authority" had rendered a final verdict. The display was a ritual and "Naipaul [was] the national scapegoat."
This attitude-an almost proprietary resentment-persists among UWI and Afro-Caribbean academics. It is as if Naipaul's articulating his positions violates the terms of his "lesser" citizenship, at which those possessed of "full" citizenship are entitled to take offence. This proprietary resentment is ubiquitous in academia and elsewhere. A good example is a (1979) paper given by historian Kelvin Singh, arguing that Adrian Cola Rienzi had not been given due importance in discussion of the labour movement, in favour of TUB Butler.
The first page of the folio containing the paper in the UWI (St Augustine) Library, is inscribed in pen: "Dr Tony Martin attacks this paper giving several instances in the paper which are incorrect and very bias [sic] and subjective. 'An incredible example of historical scholarship'" [sic]. But though they were invisible in PoS, the Indians enjoyed a renaissance elsewhere. Steven Vertovec (in his Hindu Trinidad) re- ports that sat sanghs, bhagwats, pujas, and largescale Hindu events appeared in Indo areas in the 1970s, even as Indians commuted into Creole Trinidad.
Significantly, though, there is no sense of what they were thinking -this was a community without artists, writers, books, newspapers, or voice. There were only angry expostulations from the Maha Sabha and the Indian Review Committee, who remained focused in the 1956-1961 era. The Indo majority's isolation from the national discourse, and the internal lack of a higher intellectual life, forced the Indians to turn to Bollywood for cultural and emotional templates. This distorted the Indians' already problematic emotional and cultural lives in Creole Trinidad.
Thus contradictory impulses led to paradoxical behaviour. Post-1980, the Indo opposition was beginning to consolidate and move to unification, first with the ONR, then in 1986 with the NAR: the "One Love" era. After NAR fracture and the UNC's emergence in 1988, several thousand Trinidad Indians fled to Canada claiming "refugee status," because of oppression by the black government. And this was the period 1970-1995: cultural schizophrenia and hypocrisy: Creole integrationism, Indo resentment and vex, muttered race rhetoric. Crucially, the country had no interior monologue or inner life-no space where ideas and issues were rationally discussed by smart people.
There were only empty rituals of Creole Carnival and Hindu piety. The things seething under the surface erupted in 1990, but there was no real change in race relations until Round II of Race and Nationalism: 1996-2007.
