Beyond Margins, Towards Methods: Thinking about Religion, Diaspora, and South Asia from the Caribbean

After the abolition of slavery in the British Empire, South Asians were shipped to sugar plantations across the Caribbean as indentured workers. By the end of the period of indentured labor (1838-1917), about half a million South Asians had crossed the colonial dark waters or kalapani and made their way to the (British, French, and Dutch) Caribbean. Indentured labor—a colonial scheme of migration and (forced) contract labor—produced the Indo-Caribbean diaspora, and the figure of the coolie—the portable migrant worker. In recent decades, Indo-Caribbean groups have been migrating to North America. In Canada, and the U.S., Indo-Caribbean diasporas navigate not only their own troubled transcontinental history against the background of North American politics of class, race, and religion, but also contend with inter-diasporic dynamics. As (subcontinental) South Asian majorities come to dominate narratives about South Asian diasporic religions and identities, Indo-Caribbean communities occupy diasporic and discursive margins (sometimes cast in the role of an internal “other” within an imagined homogenous South Asian diaspora). Do the disciplines of Religion, South Asian Studies, Caribbean Studies, and Asian American Studies reproduce this inter-diasporic dynamic, and imagined geography shaped by center and margins? How can scholars move beyond the trope of margins, and towards methods and new disciplinary directions that allow us a different perspective on diaspora, religion, and identity? This roundtable invites scholars to renegotiate geopolitical assumptions that shape our disciplines and map modes of thinking about religion and diaspora from (Indo-)Caribbean perspectives. Our panelists consider ethnographic and archival approaches to the study of Indo-Caribbean religions, examine inter-diasporic politics and positionality, and consider the interdisciplinary stakes and possibilities that may shape the study of Indo-Caribbean religions, in particular, and our understanding of South Asian diasporic religions, in general. Each of our four panelists will speak for approximately eight minutes, before inviting questions and comments from the audience. In the Field: Our first panelist will discuss inter-diasporic dynamics in ethnographic fieldwork, and consider how the Madrasis—a religious minority within the Indo-Caribbean diaspora—displace the nation-state through their religious narratives and invite us to think beyond frameworks of diasporic longing and belonging that center India, Guyana, or the United States. Focussing on conversations with Madrasi drummers and ritual specialists in Guyana and Brooklyn, the panelist will discuss how the Madrasis distinguish themselves from both Indo-Caribbean and South Asian American Hindu temples and groups in North America, and maintain a somewhat ambivalent (and sometimes antagonistic) relationship with the category “Hindu” in Guyana and the United States. By naming their religious community after a port of departure (Madras) and using Sunday sermons in the temple as a space of political critique, Madrasis urge us beyond notions of fabled homelands and nationalist belonging. The speaker will consider ethnographic methods of displacing the nation-state through/in the study of diasporic religions. In the Archive: Our second speaker will examine how 19th century European/American travel writing constructed Indians as separate, set apart, or marginalized in the Caribbean. These portrayals centered an Orientalized religion as a defining feature of Indo-Caribbeans’ distinctiveness and a source of their separateness. To problematize this portrayal, the speaker will analyze popular performance practices of Indo-Caribbean circus performers (priests, fakirs, fire-walkers, and dancers) in the late 19th and early 20th century. In the face of the race-, religion-, and able body-making frame of circus institutions, these performers expressed and engaged in modes of Indo-Caribbean belonging while moving along and between the overlapping margins of South Asia, the Caribbean, and the United States.Thinking with philosopher and poet Édouard Glissant’s notion of errance or errantry, the panelist will reframe these performers as errant travelers writing against colonial and imperial travel archives through their performances of Indian/Caribbean/religion in a new imperial metropole. Addressing Positionality: Our third panelist will consider the growth of research on Caribbean Hinduism and ask which voices have come to dominate our understanding of Caribbean Hinduism. They will use Caribbean Hinduism as a case study to examine how the category of diasporic Hinduism is constructed. Building on Indo-Caribbean scholars’ critique of the politics of brown mutuality and the limits of representation, they will argue that (1) Caribbean Hinduism has become a spectacle that is weaponized in the promotion of Hindu nationalism, and (2) scholars are at risk of engaging in a type of neo-orientalism when our scholarship lacks an interrogation of our positionality because of the assumption of affinity and familiarity and maybe even a desire to be connected to a familiar “other.” As a result, we limit the possibilities of diasporic studies and ways of thinking through roots and belonging other than notions of “homeland,” or in this case, “South Asianness.” Throughout their presentation, the speaker will ask: Who speaks for Caribbean Hinduism? Disciplinary Approaches: Our fourth panelist will use their presentation to call for a reorientation of our disciplinary approaches. In recent decades, we have witnessed the growth of scholarship on Caribbean Hinduism, which is frequently situated at the margins of South Asian Studies, Asian American Studies, Caribbean Studies, and Hindu Studies. Rather than studying from the margin, what possibilities open up when we center Caribbean Hinduism? The speaker shares lessons from their ethnographic fieldwork that revealed problematic assumptions that limited their research. By listening to Guyanese and Trinidadians they met and interviewed in New York City, the panelist reorientated their approach to move beyond questions of margins towards studying Caribbean Hinduism on its own terms. This reorientation, they will argue, is central to improving our understanding of (Asian) American Religions. By raising questions about ethnographic and archival methods, and addressing inter-diasporic dynamics, positionality, and disciplinary approaches in the study of Indo-Caribbean religions, we hope to make space for a larger discussion among the panelists and the audience about navigating and negotiating the geopolitical and demographic assumptions that have come to shape the study of religion in South Asia, the Caribbean, and North America.