Engendering History: A Poetics of

the Kala Pani in Ramabai Espinet’s

The Swinging Bridge
Brinda Mehta

Ramabai Espinet is a prominent Indo-Trinidadian author who has made critical contributions
to the field of Indo-Caribbean literature through a multiplicity of genres that include poetry,
short stories, literary criticism, performance, and most recently, the novel. By focusing on
the dispossessed and marginalized Indo-Caribbean experience, Espinet’s work gives voice to
the outsider represented by female immigrants, widows, girls, sex workers, and indentured
laborers via the exploration of themes such as immigration, indenture, gender marginality,
social invisibility, domestic abuse, and patriarchal inviolability in Indo-Caribbean communi-
ties. Her writings inscribe the negotiations of Indo-Caribbean female subjectivity and exilic
identity within a tradition of postcolonial writing in North America and Trinidad to establish
an important feminist poetics of literary and cultural representation in Caribbean literature.
Espinet’s debut novel, The Swinging Bridge, consolidates these preoccupations with the
political and historical agency of Indo-Caribbean women in a compelling narrative that
moves the reader back and forth between India, Trinidad, Toronto, and Montreal. The novel
is narrated by Mona Singh, a scholarship-winning student at the University of Montreal and
researcher for Films Canadiana, an independent company specializing in films on Canadian
immigration. Mona’s family moves to Canada in the 1960s after Trinidad’s independence
and the growing discrimination against Indians under the leadership of Dr. Hector James
(de Doctah). The hardships experienced by the narrator’s family as Indo-Caribbean immi-
grants in Canada seem to mirror their disempowerment as rural Indians in Trinidad, oblig-
ing Mona to develop a protective armor of self-preservation in her personal relationships.

small axe 21 • October 2006 • p 19–36 • ISSN 0799-0537

20 | SX21 • Engendering History: A Poetics of the Kala Pani in Ramabai Espinet’s The Swinging Bridge

However, she is completely unprepared in the 1990s for the devastating news of her beloved
brother Kello’s imminent death from AIDS, which provokes a family crisis of heart-wrenching
proportions.
Kello’s tragedy had begun at earlier when he was obliged to leave Trinidad at a young age
to escape his father’s daily onslaughts of violence against him, a violence that was a symptom of
the older man’s social disenfranchisement and frustrated dreams. “The Big Row” of December
1958, a confrontation between father and son, becomes a catalyst for the family’s economic
dispersal when the grandfather’s land has to be mortgaged to pay the father’s crushing debts in
Trinidad, a situation that later provokes their social dispersal in Canada as a result of immigration
and the inability to successfully assimilate to a foreign lifestyle.
Grief motivates a flood of personal memories, as Mona begins to remember intimate
details of family life that had been repressed under the cover of migration. These recollections
are further intensified when Kello makes a dying wish asking his sister to journey to Trinidad
to buy back the ancestral land. Thoughts about the impending trip back “home” and the actual
trip itself take Mona further back in time to connect spiritually with Gainder, her ancestral
foremother, in Mona’s attempt to establish a sense of historicity. The ancestor’s own life had
been impacted by a series of dislocations when she was forced to escape an unwanted marriage
to an old man, and subsequent early widowhood. The narrator’s journeys of memory weave a
complicated narrative quilt as Mona attempts to piece together the lost fragments of her family
heritage, while reconciling the multiple pasts of her Indo-Caribbean identity.
The Swinging Bridge thereby chronicles the multiple exiles that are a part of the Indian
experience in the Caribbean and North America through the “exilic trajectories” of the ances-
tral great-grandmother Gainder and the protagonist Mona. The novel commemorates the
maternal roots and routes of Indo-Caribbean history by establishing the subjectivity of widows
and young girls from India who crossed the kala pani (the black waters of the Atlantic) in
search of new beginnings in Trinidad, and the immigrant great-granddaughter who engages in
an existential quest for selfhood in Canada. Impacted by the multiple displacements of race,
class, gender, identity, tradition, and nationhood, the narrator unravels the representational
liminality of Indo-Caribbeanness in Trinidad and Canada through the scope of memory to
“confront not only her own past but the secrets of a winding family history begun on the
Indian continent almost two centuries ago,” as stated on the book’s front cover.1 This study
asserts that the “kala pani poetics” accomplishes two important objectives. It converts the
pariah status of widowhood in India into the transnational mobility of migration, while pro-
viding the great-granddaughter Mona with the necessary coming-of-age script to uncover the
fragmented and dispersed genealogy of a “mother history.”

1. Ramabai Espinet, The Swinging Bridge (Canada: Harper Collins, 2004).

 SX21 • October 2006 • Brinda Mehta | 21

The maternal history creates points of suspension between Europe, India, Canada, and
the Caribbean, while destabilizing the heteropatriarchal foundations of the colonial legacy
and Indo-Caribbean nationalism, a nationalism created by the jahajibhai bonds of fraternity
on the ships of indenture and Hinducentric ideals of femininity. The novel problematizes the
feminist scope of Indo-Caribbean history located in the interstitial spaces between colonial-
ism, Indo-Caribbean and Afro-Caribbean nationalism, and postmodern transnationalism
through a “feminist epistemology of cane.”2 This epistemology represents an enduring kala
pani poetics that exposes the imperialist project of Indian indenture in Trinidad through the
creative indigenization of the country into Chinidad or the land of sugar (3) (the Hindi word
for sugar is chini).3 It revises nationalist omissions of gender, and problematizes “homeland”
affiliations. Indenture (1838–1917) ironically provides a cartography of origin for widows and
adolescent girls who engender Indo-Caribbean history through the “back-breaking work of
reinvention” (303), wherein memory becomes a commemorative act of historical preservation,
cultural mediation, and feminist contestation.4
To appreciate the novel’s revolutionary scope it is important to consider the position of
widows in India during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Traditionally, widow-
hood was regarded as the ultimate scourge of Hindu womanhood, whereby a woman was
considered to be invisible without her husband’s presence. His death predicated her moral,
spiritual, and, in some cases, physical death because widowhood was an unacceptable social
category as it did not involve an active upholding of the pati vrata or husband worship ideal
prescribed by Brahmanic codes of morality and social conformity.5 As early as 1896, the noted
Indian feminist Pandita Ramabai denounced Hinduism’s negative prescriptions for widows,
who, when allowed to live, were subjected to the worst abuses in the form of starvation, social
ostracism, material dispossession, and physical defilement as punishment for having outlived
their husbands. The Espinet novel confirms this oppressive situation:

2. Ramabai Espinet, “The Absent Voice: Unearthing the Female Epistemology of Cane” (paper presented at the
University of Toronto, Ontario, July 1989).
3. Espinet, The Swinging Bridge, 3. References to this work appear parenthetically in text.
4. Indian history in the Caribbean begins with the “official” abolition of slavery in 1838 when a second wave of
“voluntary immigration” was mobilized from India in the form of the indentured labor trade. European sugar-
plantation owners still needed a cheap and industrious agricultural workforce that was familiar with the vagaries
of tropical plantation cultivation. The imperiousness of empire-designated rural Indian farmers from the largely
agricultural provinces of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh (although there were migrations of Tamilian workers from
Southern India as well) who were best suited for this enterprise, and impoverished farm workers were lured with
promises of better financial prospects in the new lands. The contracted labor trade brought thousands of Indians
to the French and British-controlled sugar plantations in the Caribbean, South Africa, Fiji, and the islands of the
Indian Ocean. However, the majority found themselves transported to the alien Caribbean lands of Trinidad and
Guyana.
5. See Brinda Mehta, Diasporic (Dis)locations: Indo-Caribbean Women Writers Negotiate the Kala Pani (Kingston:
University Press of the West Indies, 2004).
22 | SX21 • Engendering History: A Poetics of the Kala Pani in Ramabai Espinet’s The Swinging Bridge

“Lines of women, veils pulled over their heads, seeking refuge at the shrine of Shiva in the holy
city of Benares. . . . Their burdens, their tragedies, their reasons for being here, lie hidden deep
inside the layers of cloth that cover them. . . . They are mainly rands, widows who have escaped the
funeral pyre by means of the laws forbidding sati. . . . With no husbands to support them, many of
these women face destitution. Those who have not given birth to sons are particularly vulnerable
to abandonment by their in-laws (3).

Widowhood reflected the ultimate devaluing of Hindu women who became victims of
several social taboos and the invisible psychological pressures of family members. These abuses
were justified by the belief that a widow lost her resale value within a patriarchal economy of
exchange as she had been “contaminated” by a previous marriage that had compromised her
virginity and claims to Brahmanic purity. These purist values are encoded within a patriarchal
contract of male guardianship confining Hindu women to a sexual protectorate regulated
by the obsessive moral control of the father, son, or husband in an attempt to safeguard the
“integrity” of the Hindu household. A violation of the patriarchal contract in the form of
widowhood is tantamount to an act of criminality as it displaces the centrality of the patriarch
through his death. Consequently, while widowhood marked a woman’s liberation from the
contract it also betrayed her vulnerability to social condemnation. The novel refers to the dehu-
manization of Brahmin widows, these “despised women like Gainder Beharry, like Baboonie”
(174) whose civil status as single, unattached women conferred upon them the added moral
stigma of whoredom in the absence of male partnership. As the novel indicates: “In a book
about Christian converts in India I saw that rand meant widow, but also harlot” (175).
The automatic linking of widows and sex workers reveals the unacceptability of these
newly single women within normative Hindu moral codes, wherein they resisted explicit social
categorization in defiance of purist Brahmanic and colonial Victorian-Christian feminine
ideals of virginity, fidelity, and sexual passivity. These categories were based on cultural and
religious specifications for Hindu women that were soon validated as cultural truths of the
Hindu faith. These cultural fictions were incorporated into religious texts that posited a ritual-
ized Hindu feminine mystique, deifying the virtues of the ideal woman. As objects of elitist
Brahmanic constructions of gender that reflected “internalized notions of the golden age of
the Hindus, and of the high-minded and spiritual qualities of Vedic women,”6 Hindu women
were limited to socially confined roles that were fixed and well-defined in subordination
to men, eliminating the possibilities of spatial transgressions or cultural errancy.
It is therefore interesting to consider how the figure of the widow transforms social mar-
ginality into personalized historicity when she embarks on a solitary transatlantic journey in

6. Uma Chakravarti, “Whatever Happened to the Vedic Dasi? Orientalism, Nationalism, and a Script for the Past,” in
Recasting Women: Essays in Indian Colonial History, eds. Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid (Piscataway, New Jersey:
Rutgers University Press, 1990), 75–76.
 SX21 • October 2006 • Brinda Mehta | 23

search of redefinition and subjective visibility. Her effacement from the official Hindu mar-
riage records that nullify her status as a wife testifies to a further loss of identity initiated by
her current nonhuman status as a woman without a husband. The girl Gainder and the rand
join hands in their common disenfranchisement as single women representing unconven-
tional historical agents who subvert the biological mother and wife’s symbolic preeminence
in nationalist versions of history. The purity of the self-sacrificing maternal ideal, as the very
basis of the nationalist ethic, transforms itself into an alternative “undetermined maternity,”
as new woman-centered histories emerge from feminist kala pani readings. The novel forges
solidarity bonds between widows and adolescent girls to demonstrate how both groups have
been socially disinherited by patriarchal gender infringements that associate widowhood and
desertion from an unwanted marriage with a violation against normative expectations of
respectability.
Nevertheless, the kala pani journey facilitates the inscription of these women in recorded
history through the documents of indenture in which statistical anonymity and impersonal
documentation ironically provide a foundational script to reclaim subjectivity. As the novel
indicates: “The records of indentureship to the Caribbean show that Brahmin widows formed
an inordinate number of the females who migrated” (1). A story of Hindu inhumanity towards
widows is converted into the historical pioneering of the widows and girls of indenture when
Gainder’s story blossoms into a gendered reading of the kala pani’s maternal origins, while
highlighting a girl’s rite of passage to Trinidad. The widow sheds the opaque tones of her white
veil of shame and mourning in favor of the golden hues of the sacred marigold, the vibrant
gainder, as she undertakes a perilous crossing commemorated in the narrator’s memory: “India
receding before the immensity of ocean billows, and now there is no horizon but water, noth-
ing but pani, pani, pani . . . My foremothers, my own great-grandmother Gainder, crossing the
unknown of the kala pani, the black waters that lie between India and the Caribbean” (4). At
the same time, the rehabilitation of the widow’s humanity is tantamount to an act of cultural
treason committed by the narrator, a violation that receives its sentencing a century later in the
form of domestic abuse within her own family, economic hardship, and the untimely tragedy
of AIDS, as a reflection of the rand’s own life of misery in India.
The novel demarcates a kala pani trajectory in three discontinuous movements or sec-
tions to highlight the tenuous nature of this journey, reflecting the insecure beginnings of
women’s history championed by “the woman who had found the Vaishnavites and crossed the
kala pani alone” (295).7 As an “untold story” (3) Gainder’s crossing unearths a lost chapter in
the history of Indian migration to the Caribbean while, at the same time, it gives voice to a

7. Vaishnavites are followers of the god Vishnu.

24 | SX21 • Engendering History: A Poetics of the Kala Pani in Ramabai Espinet’s The Swinging Bridge

marginalized constituency whose stories “lie hidden deep inside the layers of cloth that cover
them” (3). According to Hindu belief, the traversing of large expanses of water was associ-
ated with contamination and cultural defilement as it led to the dispersal of tradition, family,
class, and caste classifications, and to the general loss of a “purified” Hindu essence. Kala
pani crossings were initially identified with the expatriation of convicts, low castes, and other
undesirable elements of society from the mainland to neighboring territories to rid society
of any visible traces of social pollution; those who braved the kala pani were automatically
compromising their Hinduness. For many women in particular, enduring the hardships of
the kala pani was a worthwhile risk to take because it offered the potential for renegotiations
of gendered identity within the structural dissolutions of caste, class, and religious boundar-
ies that occurred during the transatlantic displacements. Hindu women therefore seized the
opportunity to transcend their marginality within the nuclear Hindu family by embracing a
more expansive Indian diasporic community, a community that was nevertheless created by
violent disruptions and exile.8
The kala pani poetics is a gendered discourse of exilic beginnings that simultaneously
reclaims and contests otherness by highlighting the traditional invisibility of female historical
subjectivity in androcentric colonial and nationalist narratives. As Verene Shepherd asserts:
The migration to, and settlement of, thousands of Indian women in the Caribbean, the result of
a continuing postslavery imperialist project, has altered the epistemological foundations of the
history of the region. . . . The task of uncovering the historical experiences of Indian women is not
an easy one, for colonialist historiography has tended to mute the voices of exploited people, and
the subaltern, as female, was even more invisible.9

The inscription of subaltern subjectivity within a politics of exclusion calls for epistemologi-
cal reevaluations of colonial historiography from its heteropatriarchal and elitist baselines by
favoring a politics of indeterminancy conceived in terms of a “poetics of Relation” by Edouard
Glissant, a cross-cultural imaginary that favors “latency, opacity, formlessness, and muta-
tion.”10 Indeterminancy, as the poetics of the oppressed, provides the conceptual framework
for the kala pani poetics as the site of a nonlinear liminality. As a female-authored narrative
created by the tensions and ambiguities inherent in a migrating historicity of cane, the kala
pani poetics critically evaluates prior disavowals of Indo-Caribbean female subjectivity by
locating these interstitial spaces of self-inscription within the expansiveness of “the black

8. See Mehta, Diasporic (Dis)locations, 5.

9. Verene Shepherd, “Constructing Visibility: Indian Women in the Jamaican Segment of the Indian Diaspora,”
in Essays in Caribbean Feminist Thought, ed. Patricia Mohammed (Kingston: University Press of the West Indies,
2002), 7.
10. Edouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse, trans. J. Michael Dash (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia,
1989), xii.
 SX21 • October 2006 • Brinda Mehta | 25

waters that lie between India and the Caribbean” (4). As a fragmented genealogy, the kala
pani engenders a process of “coming into being” amid spatial dislocations. While tracing a
feminine epistemology that has its primary roots in colonialism and Hinducentrism, it nev-
ertheless favors the birthing of new maternal routes and revised colonial datelines in the form
of “Gainder, the girl who had escaped an unwanted marriage, is thirteen years old when she
arrives at the island of Trinidad” (247).
The discovery of the ancestor’s traces towards the end of the novel becomes the starting
point for the narrator’s own family history to indicate why colonial history must be reverted
from its chronological progression to expose the displaced historicity of the colonized. These
“backward resurrections” described by Wilson Harris undermine colonial history’s systematiz-
ing power to chronicle, contain, and narrate the subaltern’s history from a unilateral perspec-
tive in a misguided attempt to immortalize a Western victory narrative. As a result of these
historical deconstructions in the novel, the uncovering of an individual story becomes a point
of motivation to chronicle a collective experience in the form of the narrator’s genealogy that
spans three generations, and her community’s history since indenture. The “swinging bridge”
provides an apt metaphor for these indeterminate timelines in which the past mediates a
future-inspired present in the form of multiple diasporic dislocations and exilic relocations.
Through a translocational lens, the novel gives presence to the diversity and complexity of the
Indian experience of migration to the Americas in discontinuous form through flashbacks,
introversion, cultural documentation, and the multiple reversions of exile to reveal a kala pani
cartography encoded in narrative memory.
The traversing of the kala pani by the first Indian immigrants has come to symbolize the
primordial journey into exile for Indo-Caribbean communities whose origins have reflected the
tenuousness of uprooted affiliations, as in the case of their Afro-Caribbean counterparts. While
it is true that Indians were allowed to retain primary elements of their culture and traditions,
unlike the systematic sociocultural genocide experienced by enslaved Africans, it is also expedi-
ent to indicate that indenture created a historical and ontological vacuum exacerbated by the
Indian dilemma of preserving ethnic identity in the face of creolization and Christian values.11
The novel associates the precariousness of Indian identity in the Caribbean with the anxiety of
standing on shaky ground: “If you happen to be born into an Indian family, an Indian family
from the Caribbean, migratory, never certain of the terrain, that’s how life falls down around
you” (15). The continued perception of Indians as migrants in Trinidad has problematized
questions of Caribbean legitimacy for them within a dominant creolized framework. Viewed
as immigrants rather than Caribbean citizens, Indians have symbolized the very “enigma of

11. See Mehta, Diasporic (Dis)locations, 154–55.

26 | SX21 • Engendering History: A Poetics of the Kala Pani in Ramabai Espinet’s The Swinging Bridge

arrival” that has served to justify their marginal status. The “othering” of Indians has situated
them outside representation within patterns of “oblivion and selectivity” that have located
them at the periphery, as disenfranchised immigrants and strangers in a hostile land.12 Indian
women encountered another level of alterity through their exotic strangeness, their spirit of
independence, which flew in the face of expected patterns of Indian female obsequiousness,
their ability to do hard labor, and their scarcity in numbers. Intimidating to African, colonial,
and Indian men alike, these women had to endure the added burden of gender discrimination
in their struggles for survival both during and after the kala pani crossings.
Consequently, the choice of a female ancestor in the novel has particular resonance for
Espinet who critiques the politics of cane and its negation of female epistemologies. As she
states in “The Absent Voice”:
I want to begin by asserting that within the chorus of voices modulating the discourse on cane—its
history, politics, sociology, culture and literature—one voice is notably absent. It is the voice of
the female cane-cutter of Indian extraction in the Caribbean context. And because that voice has
not been present, speaking out of the depths of her personal history, the experience of that woman
has been denied.13

While the passage to the Caribbean charts a new historical subjectivity for indentured women
like Gainder, their inscription in the Caribbean’s colonial legacy of cane reinstates the exclu-
sions experienced in India on account of the divisive and racist colonial machinations of the
plantation economy. The intersecting alienations of race, class, and gender discrimination
necessitate the development of a “trinitarian” consciousness for these women as a kala pani lens
to refract dominant paradigms of Caribbeanness and Indianness in a transnational context.
The novel indicates that Indo-Caribbean women’s histories are located within a culture of
loss and secrecy; their retrieval from the archives of oblivion is both a political act and a strategy
of self-preservation. The narrator ruminates: “And I wondered how much of my grandmother’s
life had been conducted in secrecy while she struggled to hold the pieces that she had lost, her
mother Gainder and the songs she sang” (275). Disparate fragments of an obscured life are
held together by the tenuous bonds of memory in an active stance of resistance to erasure and
amnesia within nationalist and colonial schemes. Marginalized by competing Hindu, African,
and European patriarchies as objects of hard labor, violence, and sexual control, Indian women
were particularly vulnerable to their exclusion from the jahajibhai bonds of fraternity that
formed during the Atlantic crossings. These bonds represented a defensive strategy to survive
the trauma of displacement and the emasculation of Indian masculinity in the Caribbean.

12. See Kusha Haraksingh, “Structure, Process and Indian Culture in Trinidad,” in After the Crossing: Immigrants and
Minorities in Caribbean Creole Society, ed. Howard Johnson (London: Frank Cass, 1988), 114.
13. Espinet, “The Absent Voice,” 1.
 SX21 • October 2006 • Brinda Mehta | 27

Patricia Mohammed indicates that the Indian patriarchy was situated at the lowest level of
the patriarchal chain because of its lack of political, educational, and national agency. This
fractured sense of Hindu masculinity translated feelings of male powerlessness symptomatic of
the insecurities of indenture.14 While Indian women were in a stronger position to negotiate
the newness of their situation in lands that offered the promise of enhanced gender possibili-
ties for the future (in the form of a revised balance of power within family structures), Indian
men seemed to suffer greatly from the vulnerabilities of new beginnings, especially in terms
of their control over women.
The jahajibhai enclaves consequently provided the foundation for a defensive and male-
centered Hindu nationalism in which women were either reduced to a conceptual value of ideal-
ized femininity imported from Brahmanic India or subjected to violent acts of compliance to
salve bruised male egos. As the novel indicates: “Banding together for strength, these jahaji bhais
devised new codes that would force women down on their knees, back into countless acts of self-
immolation” (297). The need to assert authority as a collectivity betrays the anxiety produced by
these suspended masculinities, unable to control the women’s flagrant violation of the patriarchal
contract through their refusal to abide by the rules of male heteronormativity. While the hetero-
sexual family unit represents the very foundation of national unity, the women of indenture dispel
the myth of the unified patriarchal family through the fragmentation of family life because a vast
majority of these women were unmarried in their capacity as widows, divorcees, single mothers,
and young girls (like Gainder) fleeing the expectations of an arranged marriage.
Several studies have highlighted the economic and sexual initiative displayed by Indian
women on the estates during the early years of indenture. Disproportionate sex ratios created
possibilities for a certain sexual freedom among women, a freedom to dictate their own terms
of availability or inaccessibility to multiple male partners, whether Indian or African. In addi-
tion, modest (though unequal) wages for plantation work provided a semblance of financial
security in the face of the increasing male control and violence that arose as a calculated
response to curtail female self-reliance in the public sphere. In this instance, the figure of the
rand poses the ultimate threat to the jahajibhai brethren through her self-assertive stance and
her subversion of any nationalist illusions about the authenticity of virginal national origins:
The rand, casting her vivid shadow upon the face of indenture, obscured for more than one century,
shook her defiant, dancing body in the faces of those closed knots of jahaji bhais, boys all, who
clung together for solace in rumshops and gayaps, canepiece marajs among them, laying down the
codes for holding brave women in their places (297).

14. See Patricia Mohammed, “The Creolization of Indian Women in Trinidad,” in Trinidad and Tobago: The
Independence Experience 1962–1982, ed. Selwyn Ryan (St. Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago: Institute of Social and
Economic Research, University of the West Indies, 1988), 381–98.
28 | SX21 • Engendering History: A Poetics of the Kala Pani in Ramabai Espinet’s The Swinging Bridge

The rand further intensifies male fears of national origin and purist avowals of Hindu iden-
tity in her antinationalist, antipatriarchal mothering of Indo-Caribbean history that emerges
slowly from the shadows of darkness and invisibility due to external and internal negations.
This dual obscurity is revealed in a conversation between the narrator and her cousin Bess:
Bess . . . became serious as we talked about the two Trinidads that still existed. “We are just begin-
ning to be known to the general population, Mona. So much about us is unknown to them.” And
to us as well, I thought, so much about us is unknown to us, but kept the words to myself (277).

Mainstream public disavowals of Indo-Trinidadian identity complement the unresolved

psychological alienation of Indians themselves, creating a community tormented by the
anxiety of affiliation and the defensiveness of an ambiguous social status. The novel suggests
that this existential ambivalence provokes the emergence of a racist nationalism as a reaction
to prolonged social marginality and cultural illegitimacy, wherein cultural insularity and
an exaggerated sense of Indian inviolability become a reactive method to negotiate alterity:
“Indian pride is commendable, but hatred of others is not. I feel a rigid kind of thinking
coming through” (300–301). How does a marginalized community negotiate cultural pride
and historical subjectivity without subscribing to a virulent nationalism that will reinforce its
subalternity in the Caribbean, while further accentuating the visibility of Indian difference?
How does nationalism reveal its “undemocratic” intent by excluding women, children, and
minorities on the one hand, while impeding interracial dialogue on the other? Can Indo-
Caribbean nationalism sustain itself by subscribing to the politics of male chauvinism and
female disenfranchisement? The narrator highlights the “national” omission of gender by
referring to a special exhibit on Indo-Caribbean cultural heritage curated by her cousin Bess.
Despite Bess’s hard work to ensure the success of the exhibition, “the official pamphlet for
the exhibit that night had made no mention of her name” (301). Does nationalism reveal the
success of the colonial project through divisive politicking and racial alienation? The Swinging
Bridge presents these tensions as mediated points of suspension that nevertheless remain at an
emerging level of conflict resolution.
The novel problematizes a second major Indo-Caribbean insecurity in the form of Indian
engagements and disengagements with Creoleness identified with the dominant Afrocentered
culture. In so doing, it pays particular attention to the situation of Christianized Indians
whose assimilation of Creole values in the name of survival and adaptation reveals a profound
sense of disconnection from foundational roots. Espinet highlights the unique presence of
the Canadian Presbyterian Mission schools in Trinidad and their influential impact on the
creation of an isolated Indo-Creole middle class that was considered to be a buffer class
between the Creole (black) populations and the rural, uneducated Indians. Assimilated to the
point of accepting Western norms as their own, this class was subjected to a dual colonization
 SX21 • October 2006 • Brinda Mehta | 29

represented by British and Canadian points of view.15 The novel demonstrates how the conver-
sion to Christianity reinforced the precarious position of Indo-Caribbean Christians through
mediated identifications, a disavowal of history, and the internalization of Western referents.
Referring to the intellectual assimilation of her own parents, the narrator admits:
My parents, stylish and cool, keeping in step with the fashion of those far-off times in cosmopolitan
Trinidad, once dubbed nothing less than “the Paris of the West Indies.” . . . Their glamour they
got from the movies of the day; their noble ideals they got from the book-club memberships that
brought Lloyd C. Douglas, Pearl Buck, and Emile Zola into our home. Their moral rectitude,
though, they got from the Bible and the evangelical enterprise of the Canadian Mission. Indenture-
ship was over; it had ended in 1917, before they were born, and denial had set in. All that backward
stuff was best forgotten (29).

Internalizing the racism of dominant stereotypes characterizing Indians as backward, unre-

fined, and lacking in moral integrity, the parents become colonial caricatures who overtly
discard Indian traditions as a means to acquire a passport to Trinidadian respectability.
Creolization has, to some extent, furthered the divide between blackness and Indian-
ness by often excluding the Hindu experience as a strategy of moving away from Indianness
and indigenized Indo-Caribbean customs. This exclusion has, consciously or unconsciously,
affirmed the superiority of Creole culture at the expense of the “primitiveness,” of “coolie,” of
indentured, culture. At the same time, creolization seductively offered working class Hindu
and Christian women the possibility of resisting rigid patterns of socialization imposed on
them by a Hindu patriarchy, in the name of cultural integrity. The creolization of Indian
women was consequently seen as an infraction likened to the Hindu taboo of crossing the kala
pani. Moreover, the Hindu orthodoxy labeled the creolization of Indian women as a form of
gendered assimilation to a dominant cultural model, given the absence of a distinctive Indian
component in the term’s nomenclature. Creolization thereby produced an ambiguous tension
in Indo-Caribbean female identity. While providing an enabling alternative to gender-role
conformity on the one hand, it also furthered the marginal representation of Indians as a
whole.
In the narrator’s family, the negation of Indian identity is inscribed within a well-
established family tradition: “Like their parents before them, abandoning Hindu and Muslim
traditions in favour of education, Muddie and Da-Da anchored themselves inside their Pres-
byterian community, building a slow, deadly respectability” (29). The narrator equates this
denial with a slow and painful spiritual death occasioned by a schizophrenic cultural posturing

15. See Frank Birbalsingh, “Interview with Ramabai Espinet,” in From Pillar to Post: The Indo-Caribbean Experience, ed.
Frank Birbalsingh (Toronto: TSAR, 1997), 162–97.
30 | SX21 • Engendering History: A Poetics of the Kala Pani in Ramabai Espinet’s The Swinging Bridge

that creates a psychic split between the public and private spheres of life. The novel reveals
this discrepancy:
It was a time when newly educated people would throw out almost everything Indian at first, and
would slowly gather back into their lives only those relics that were essential for survival. Eating sada
roti and tomato chokha, wearing gold churias at weddings, drying mangoes for achar and kuchela,
treating nara with a special massage, rubbing down the limbs of babies with coconut oil: all seeping
gradually back into Indian life in the towns and all well hidden except at home (29).

Relics from the past transform themselves into vital staples of survival in the present, cam-
ouflaged under the cover of home space. The novel suggests that this inside-outside dialectic
does not lead to the development of a dual consciousness needed to negotiate marginality
through an insightful double vision; instead, it intensifies the trauma of displacement experi-
enced on an unconscious primal level. Violence, domestic abuse, and alcoholism become the
unacknowledged symptoms of these psychic disavowals, creating dysfunctional social impasses
in the characters’ lives: “When Da-Da left Trinidad, he left with many other Indians who had
also felt themselves at a standstill” (77).
Social and economic immobility in Trinidad prompts the narrator’s father to undertake
a second kala pani crossing with his family to North America in search of a new lease on life.
Nevertheless, the mimetic reproduction of the first crossing a century later revives the primal
trauma of unbelonging when Indianness persists as a visible marker of difference. The spatial
mobility of migration does not complement the illusion of social mobility in Canada, leading
to the very same impasses that the family attempted to escape in the first place. The narrator
exposes the family’s dilemma:
We had reproduced our very early life here in many ways, being in my parents’ house again brought
this truth home to me. We, and others like us, were living in our own insular world, oblivious
of how we appeared to the rest of the society around us. However protected we had been in our
little Presbyterian world in San Fernando, one shove into the bustle of Port of Spain would put us
squarely back into our places as country Indians, nothing more. All it took then in Trinidad was
looking Indian; all it took now in Canada was skin colour. We had not moved one inch (81).

As highlighted in the novel, Indo-Caribbean identity in the Americas is inscribed in a

double bind, caught in the suspension of not being “Caribbean enough” or “Indian enough,”—
an inverted dialectic reflected in the narrator’s comments about seeing her “whole life still
hanging suspended in mid-air” (79). This suspension, as a precarious balancing act, raises
questions of foundational roots and the efficacy of ancestral affiliations with India. Refusing
to initially accept India as a locus of identification, the narrator admits: “But I never wanted
to go to India, a place our ancestors had left more than a century ago, where we heard that
poverty was the way of life” (40). The ancestral land does not represent an idealized referent
 SX21 • October 2006 • Brinda Mehta | 31

for the narrator due to the pain of indenture. The abjection of Indian poverty provides a disen-
chanting source of identification to locate the beginnings of Indo-Caribbean historicity within
negative models of disempowerment, violence, rejection, and unromantic associations, even
though the narrator respects the fortitude of the men and women who braved the kala pani.
The narrator’s partial knowledge about India is limited to the experience of indenture and its
aftermath colluding with colonial stereotypes of Indian misery as the only reality of India, ste-
reotypes that were further racialized to characterize Indians in the Caribbean. Located within
an attraction-repulsion paradigm of betrayal and treachery, India symbolizes the castrating
mother who condemns her children to servitude by initiating the trauma of separation.
India’s foreignness confounds the narrator especially when she is obliged to confront
the Indianness in her Caribbean identity, while dealing with the truncated aspects of her
Indo-Caribbeanness. What does it mean to be of Indian origin in Trinidad when India
refuses to engage itself in a reciprocal relationship with Indo-Caribbeans? Can a return to
the ancestral land ever lead to a dialogue of reconciliation between homeland and diaspora?
Can cultural retention in diaspora lay claims to Indian authenticity despite and in spite of
cultural exchanges with other ethnicities in the new land? If the Indian ideal is associated with
dominant Hinducentric values that exclude and marginalize Muslim and Christian perspec-
tives, how does this primary reference point accommodate non-Hindu, creolized, douglarized
African-Indian, and other mixed race affiliations in Trinidad?
When the narrator’s Uncle Peter returns to an Indian village to trace his family roots, he
is both disappointed and heartbroken by the unresponsive reception that he receives from
the village elders:
Uncle Peter talked about tracing his family’s roots in India. The village small small. The dust white
and blinding. It was a crime to cross the black water, the kala pani. One of several brothers went
to town one day and he never returned. Just so, he vanished off the face of the earth. A family
legend. A circle (90).

In India, the association of the kala pani with deviance invalidates the emotional intensity of
prodigal returns, wherein there are no feasts of welcome or transatlantic embraces for mem-
bers of an extended family: “But no one moved to hold him or touch him. Nor did they ask
questions about his home or his family. . . . But no invitation to return was offered, nor did
they ask to see his children. They were satisfied. The circle has been closed” (91). The uncle’s
return does not represent the cyclical departures and arrivals that characterize diasporic move-
ment, a going back and forth between two “home” spaces to realize a transnational plenitude
that incorporates diaspora and ancestral land in an undifferentiated territoriality. Instead,
the completed circle indicates a point of finality, a closed chapter that maintains the sanctity
of Indian history without the “contaminating” stains of indenture. In this way, India can
32 | SX21 • Engendering History: A Poetics of the Kala Pani in Ramabai Espinet’s The Swinging Bridge

absolve itself of any claims of accountability or complicity with corrupt immigration officials
who lured unsuspecting, economically disadvantaged rural Indians onto The Artist and other
merchant ships with promises of prosperity in distant lands, while simultaneously defending
the purity of its nationalist origins.
The unilateral relationship with the motherland reduces India to a mnemonic artifact
commemorated in a museum of Indian heritage, where a series of still life objects and images
represent frozen impressions of a distant memory. When the narrator returns to Trinidad to
tend to her brother’s business after his death from AIDS in Canada, she witnesses her cousin
Bess’s efforts to convert India into a monumental presence in Trinidad: “The plans had been
drawn up and the committee members were engaged in massive fundraising to make the
museum a reality. In the meantime artifacts, objects, and precious mementoes from the Indian
past were pouring in and they needed to store them” (282). While objects from the past are
fetishized for their memorializing value on the one hand, they are nonetheless given new life
as silent witnesses of Indo-Caribbean history testifying to the resilience, courage, and creativity
of the early Indians who could no longer be represented solely in terms of their victimization
in colonial records: “There were chuntas, calchuls, a whole clay chulhah, peerhas, pooknis,
belnas, tawas, lotas, tarias, hammocks—objects brought from India once or made here out
of skills that had survived the crossing. Items such as these had made our lives possible in
times when a life could barely be imagined” (283). Each item displays a unique aspect of the
Indo-Caribbean experience in Trinidad to reveal its richness, complexity, creative adaptability,
spirituality, and resistance to prolonged adversity.
The museum gives the Indo-Caribbean experience a certain structure and visibility as a
foundational presence just as the narrator personalizes her own historicity when she discovers
Gainder’s story in her grandmother’s shop books: “And like an image developing slowly on
photo-sensitive paper a picture of the woman Gainder began to appear” (293). The ancestor’s
image gives a face to the narrator’s personal history as an authorizing thumbprint and claim
to legitimacy. This sensorial and photosensitive impression provides a genealogical blueprint
to locate Indo-Caribbean women’s history within the narrative threads of memory interwo-
ven in Gainder’s songs. The inventiveness and improvisational nature of orality opposes his-
torical stasis by providing a decolonized, anti-essentialist narrative, wherein women’s history
composes itself in song, as an expression of the collective unconscious:
And in the face of renewed opposition to their freedom, women like Baboonie, like my great-
grandmother Gainder, sang songs, stringing together with bawdy humour, tenderness, pain, and
honesty the scattered beads of their new lives. “Singing Ramayana” they called these nights of
singing, when women would get together to listen (298).
 SX21 • October 2006 • Brinda Mehta | 33

The woman-centered tradition of “Singing Ramayana” translates a certain longing for history
in the form of a kala pani anthem of resistance, survival, and redemption.
However, in a conference paper titled “Singing Ramayana: The Text of Sita’s Fidelity,”
Espinet indicates that even though both men and women recited verses from the sacred
book in the early days of indenture, women at that time creatively problematized the text on
women’s fidelity and self-abnegation. The women reimagined the epic as a text of contesta-
tion by inscribing resistance to cultural dictates over domestic virtue. Espinet pays homage
to these women, positioning them as the first revolutionary Indo-Caribbean history makers.
Through orality and creative reimaginings, these women subverted the importance of man-
datory behavioral prescriptions for women in order to elaborate their own subjectivities.16
Their songs position Indo-Caribbean women’s historicity within the triple variants of identity,
migration, and memory to indicate how these oral narratives symbolized hope and renewed
possibilities for the future through a process of creative resistance. By revealing the polycentric
nature of Indian women’s experiences in the Caribbean, these songs provided women with
an immediate resource to organize their private revolutions via prediscursive insurrections
as a means of diffusing the fixity of Hindu and colonial cultural mandates. Orality provided
these women with a new historicism in a noninstitutionalized language wherein, “there had
to be a way, some other way, to tell this story of the courage and endurance of these forgotten
women,” (297) as suggested by the narrator.
The language of the body provides a rich corporeal text to uncover “the still fertile lines
of belly exposed between subtle twists of diaphanous cloth” (3) in a creative birthing of voice
that remembers the past by making new memories in the present. While speaking its text of
exploitation and violation, the female voice claims its individuality by giving these abuses a
public forum in song unhindered by institutional bureaucracy or limited access to writing.
As the narrator remembers:
I thought of how the first glimmerings of that perilous journey had come to me as child, listening
to the beggar women, Baboonie, singing her grief on nights when it rained so heavily. . . . It was
Baboonie’s hooded figure, her music beaten out of nothing but pain, that shadowed this tale that
Grandma Lil had struggled to keep alive (297).

As a form of corporeal autograph, Baboonie’s songs awaken the narrator’s senses to the
sound of a primeval cry, a birthing scream that enunciates a particular “womanspeak,” while
simultaneously revealing the scars of ancient wounds. This voice provides a counter narrative
of expression for the disfavored subaltern whose language articulates women’s complicated

16. Ramabai Espinet, “Singing Ramayana: The Text of Sita’s Fidelity” (paper presented at the Association of Caribbean
Women Writers and Scholars Conference, Grenada, May 1988).
34 | SX21 • Engendering History: A Poetics of the Kala Pani in Ramabai Espinet’s The Swinging Bridge

trajectories of pain, longing, hope, and loss in humanized narrative form that invites
identification, participation, and preservation.
The act of “singing Ramayana” constantly recreates itself in popular expression through
active “chutneyfication,” when lyrics from the past are reconfigured according to their post-
colonial applicability. The musical expertise of the ostracized rand allows her to reclaim her
humanity as the mother griot or composer and creator of these dynamic historicities. The
narrator marvels at the rand’s skills of interpretation in her role as cultural scribe:
I visited the rand several times after our first visit and wrote down her explanations of Gainder’s
songs. I taped her singing the one that had come into common usage, the popular chutney love
song whose composer was long forgotten. These songs were my bounty, swinging open a doorway
into another world, returning across the kala pani to the India the girl Gainder had left, alone. They
told a tale of love and loss, distance, journeying, hope, hardship piled upon hardship (293).

As songs of reconciliation, these tunes reinstate the link between India and Trinidad through
a bridge of memory constructed by the lilting cadence of a love song.
Orality marks the passage from the nostalgic past to the reclaiming of the present through
the phenomenon of chutney, thereby making a political statement about working-class Indian
women, particularly in Trinidad. Rhoda Reddock states that:
“chutney” is the term used locally to refer to a folk form of Indo-Trinidadian music and dance.
Most sources suggest that it derives its tradition from Indian folk practices of the non-Brahmani-
cal castes and rural folk as well as the ritual sensuous and suggestive dances of Hindu women at
women’s ceremonies on the eve of weddings.17

The political dimensions of chutney are located in women’s contestations of class distinc-
tions and Brahmanical notions of female purity. Located at the grassroots rural level, chutney
dancing and singing celebrate the female body in its sensual expansiveness by representing
the power of the female body in motion. Chutney has provided women with an entire range
of esthetic expression that subverts their immobilization in confining Hindu and Christian
mythical structures.
At the same time, purist disavowals of chutney have been generated by a defensive angst
as a reaction to what is seen as licentious behavior, undermining the Hindu male’s moral
guardianship of female sexuality. For this reason, Gainder falls in love with a Christian man
named Joshua in whom she recognizes a kindred spirit. She imagines that Joshua’s Christian
background and education signals a life with more options than that of a traditional Hindu
bride. Ironically, this marriage brings about the loss of an integral part of Gainder’s spirit

17. Rhoda Reddock, “Contestations over National Culture in Trinidad and Tobago: Considerations of Ethnicity, Class
and Gender,” in Caribbean Portraits: Essays on Gender Ideologies and Identities, ed. Christine Barrow (Kingston: Ian
Randle, 1988), 433.
 SX21 • October 2006 • Brinda Mehta | 35

symbolized by “her talent for singing and composing” (248) when Joshua reveals his true
intentions. While Gainder’s performances provide financial support, public recognition for
her talent, and mobility between estates, the marriage leads to a suppression of voice as a
result of her obliged compliance to a husband’s dictates. The new husband who “had never
worked in the fields but had been one of the missionaries’ earliest and proudest converts”
(249) reenacts the missionary’s “civilizing” credo within his household in evident disdain for
Hindu cultural traditions: “Joshua waits a full month after the wedding to tell Gainder that
she must never sing or dance in public again. Her heart turns to stone when she hears these
words” (249). The incompatibility of Hindu and Christian traditions inscribed within an
inferiority-superiority dialectic creates internal tensions that prevent Gainder from realizing
chutney’s complete potential, while also revealing common patriarchal codes of domesticity
within both religious traditions.
Nevertheless, a century later, Indo-Caribbean feminists such as Espinet and Rawwida
Baksh-Sooden have reclaimed chutney as a positive sign of affirmation for and by Indian
women and their fight for political and cultural inclusion in the national imaginary. While the
reconfigured dynamism of chutney calls for the indigenization of Trinidadian culture through
the explicit recognition of its Indian components situating women as agents of social change,
the narrator seeks the more integrated douglarized rhythms of the “Caroni Dub” that recognize
Trinidad’s Africanness and Indiannness in a mixed race Hindu-Christian diasporic beat:
It must have been one day when I was very young, living in that small island at the bottom of the
Caribbean Sea, that I first heard that beat, never to lose it. It was made of itself, a sound not yet in its
present form because even as I spoke the beat was just coming into existence . . . I heard the beat of
the hosay drum inside the steelband, heard chac-chac and dholak, dhantal, cuatro, and iron, coming
to me in a rhythm that had transfixed me for hours. A dub rhythm, the Caroni dub (305).

For the narrator, douglarization represents an antiracialized, antinationalist text that acknowl-
edges and celebrates the cultural plurality of Trinidad, a vibrant expression of Caribbean
cosmopolitanism needed to transcend partisan politics and rivalries. The verve of Afro-
Caribbean dub mixes with Indian folk songs from the Caroni plain to produce a unique indig-
enous beat that is more reflective of Trinidad’s multicultural identity today. The Caroni dub
emerges from historical experience stressing the commonality of experience between African
slavery and Indian indenture as two insidious forms of colonial exploitation. This search for
common ground should help to bridge the gap between the antagonism and misunderstand-
ings that exist even today between Indians and Africans as Trinidad swings into the new
millennium as a “dougla nation.”
In conclusion, The Swinging Bridge traverses the timelines of history in a dizzying trans-
atlantic journey. The novel bridges the gap between nineteenth century indenture and twen-
tieth century migration by linking the indentured Indian foremother with her estranged
36 | SX21 • Engendering History: A Poetics of the Kala Pani in Ramabai Espinet’s The Swinging Bridge

great-granddaughter in a kala pani poetics of displacement, border crossings, alienation, and

adaptation. While the ancestor “sings Ramayana” as a kala pani song of exile, the narrator
seeks redefinition in the Caroni dub as the new rhythm of an energized Caribbean historicity.
The primal song of the Indian ancestor transforms itself into a creative diasporic beat, uniting
Indian women across centuries and continents through the tenuous swinging of the bridges
of exilic movement. The kala pani poetics, as an important “reading of cane,” establishes the
historical subjectivity of Indo-Caribbean women through creative and politicized reinventions
that negotiate gender liminality within models of Indian nationalism, colonial documentation,
and Caribbean legitimacy. These discourses reveal their own points of suspension as part of
the suspended realities of migration, forced labor, and the diasporic process to demonstrate
how the “swinging bridge” interrogates the disjunction of past alienations, while initiating the
necessary movement toward possible reconciliatory conjunctions in the future.