Manuel - Tales, tunes, and tassa drums: retention and invention in Indo-Caribbean music

Tales, Tunes, and Tassa Drums

Retention and Invention
in Indo-Caribbean Music

Peter Manuel

2015 by the Board of Trustees
of the University of Illinois
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
C 5 4 3 2 1
This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Manuel, Peter, 1952
Tales, tunes, and tassa drums: retention and invention
in Indo-Caribbean music / Peter Manuel.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-252-03881-5 (hardback)
ISBN 978-0-252-09677-8 (ebook)
1. Bhojpuri (Indic people)Caribbean area
MusicHistory and criticism. 2. Folk music
Caribbean AreaHistory and criticism.
I. Title.
ML3565.M373 2015
781.62'91454072983dc23 2014016323

In fond memory of
Rudy Sasenarine
19672012

In 2000 I completed what turned out to be for me an initial phase of research in Indo-Caribbean music, having generated a book, a documentary video, and several articles, most dealing with the idiosyncratic genre of local-classical music and chutney, which had turned into a pop phenomenon. I had noted that genres like chowtal, a springtime group folksong, and tassa, a Trinidadian drum style, clearly merited serious study, whether by myself or someone else, but my own research interests meandered northward, as they had before, to the Spanish Caribbean. In early spring 2007, however, I found myself in India, concluding a research trip on Sufi music. Visiting Banaras, the urban hub of the Bhojpuri region whence most Indo-Caribbean immigrants had come, I decided to look for local chowtal groups, assuming that since such ensembles abounded in the Caribbean and Fijian diasporas, I would have no difficulty locating them in their ancestral homeland. However, I was at once surprised, frustrated, and intrigued to find that the genres were utterly unknown to most of my informants. Even specialists in local folk music responded to my inquiries with what became a refrain, Chowtal?There is no such thing; no, you must mean chaupi, or You must mean chait, or You must mean chaupadi. Actually, however, I did mean chowtal, and with some perseverance and luck I eventually found some groups in the region whose style closely resembled that of the Guyanese group with whom I occasionally sang in New York. Returning home to New York, I immersed myself in the local Guyanese and Trinidadian chowtal scenes, and as my interest extended to the thriving local tassa scene, I found myself exploring a vast stratum of Indo-Caribbean music that was quite new to me and conspicuously in need of documentation.

For its part, Trinidadian tassa drumming turned out to be a thriving music idiom of considerable richness and variety, and, as I discovered, with its own complex relationship with its North Indian counterpart. Unlike chowtal, tassa was easy to find in the Banaras area, but rather than representing a vital parallel tradition, the Banaras-region drumming I found was simple, crude, and amateurishnothing like the virtuosic and exciting Trinidadian style, with its formalized composite meters and cadences, its balance of tradition and innovation, and its lively performance scene of competitions and weddings. Obviously, in the tassa and chowtal realms there was more going on than the various predictable processes of retention, decline, or creolization. As one thing led to another, my interests at once widened in scope and congealed in thematic focus, and subsequent return trips to Trinidad, Suriname, and Bhojpuri India provided the rest of the data that generated this book.

In focusing on this more traditional layer of Indo-Caribbean music culture, I am aware that I could be regarded as nostalgically fetishizing retentions, as Morton Klass had been accused of doing in his 1961 study of an Indo-Trinidadian village. Certainly, in shunning contemporary hit-parade ephemera like reggae-chutney fusions I was guilty of turning my back on the phenomena of pop hybridity and secondary-diaspora transnationalism that so excites modern cultural-studies devotees. And yet the reasons for studying traditional and neotraditional Indo-Caribbean musics are compelling. As genres, chowtal, tassa, birha, and antiphonal Ramayan singing either had been or remained prodigiously cherished and important components of Indo-Caribbean culture, and are of such richness and broad popularity that they cried out for analytical study. Particularly enigmatic, intriguing, and unexplored are their historical relationships to counterparts in Bhojpuri India. What elements had been brought from India to the Caribbean? What, or where, were their precise sources? What was created anew in the Caribbean? Why had some genres flourished and others declined? What explained the various similarities to or differences from contemporary North Indian counterparts? How had their meanings changed? And above all, what were the sociomusical dynamics that conditioned their trajectories?

Such issues, I believe, far from being of purely antiquarian interest, areor should becentral to the burgeoning field of diaspora studies, however much contemporary diaspora scholars remain enthralled by postmodern transnationalism. Further, in multiethnic Guyana, Suriname, and especially Trinidad, questions about the origins of musical entities are often hotly debated, especially as they are invoked in polemics about the status of Indo-Caribbeans in national polities or the place of certain music forms in local culture. Hence, in different Trinidadian discursive contexts, one finds various arguments made, generally without adequate substantiation, about the origins of various musical entities. In some cases, attempts are made to legitimize a genre or practice by asserting its antiquity and its direct derivation from India. In other contexts, Trinidadians may assert, however dubiously, the local invention of entities like the dantl idiophone, or even tassa drumming. Such theories may be advanced in order to match the local creole creation of the steel drum and to counter the accusation that Indo-Trinidadians remain wedded to Old World tradition and are thus somehow less Trinidadian than their Afro-Caribbean compatriots. Indeed, some of my own findings have already on occasion been invoked, appropriately or not, by polemicists.

As a North American academic and an outsider to Caribbean ethnic negotiations, my own interest in the dynamics of musical retention and invention has been primarily academic, but I am happy to be able to contribute in my own pedantic way to the enhanced appreciation and understanding of Indo-Caribbean music culture in its diverse forms. If, for example, chowtal is recognized as being largely a retention in terms of style, the fact that it is thriving in the diaspora while declining in India should make its survival a matter of pride and import for Indo-Caribbeans. Meanwhile, the importance of Trinidadian tassa drumming derives, by contrast, from its very uniqueness as an art form that, while originating in North Indian tradition, has evolved into a distinctly and dynamically local entity. A dispassionate historical understanding of these genres may, I believe, inform and enhance a passionate appreciation of them, whether on the part of Indo-Caribbeans or others.

Any study hoping to trace Indo-Caribbean folk music elements to Bhojpuri-region sources, or even to relate such elements to modern North Indian counterparts, is doomed to being provisional and tentative. First, there is no doubt that many aspects of Bhojpuri diasporic music culture, including, for example, specific songs and tunes, derive from entities that have changed unrecognizably or disappeared in North India since the indenture period and hence will not be unearthed by even the most assiduous researcher. Moreover, it is entirely likely that many such diasporic entities derive from Bhojpuri-region sources that were not generalized or widespread but were peculiar to a specific region or perhaps even one village. The Bhojpuri region, however, is vast, and documentation of its folk music remains woefully uneven and incomplete, despite the earnest studies of several researchers, both Western and Indian. Many areas, particularly in Bihar, are unsafe for travel, not to mention for extended ethnomusicological fieldwork, infested as they are with Maoist rebels, criminal gangs, or landlords paramilitary thugs. The music of such regions thus remains poorly documented. Moreover, even the researcher-friendly areas like the Banaras region remain understudied. Scholars such as Edward O. Henry and Hiralal Tiwari have published excellent and wide-ranging surveys of that regions music, but even these cannot hope to be comprehensive, and many significant and rich genres of that region, from Mirzapuri kajri to chowtal, remain essentially unstudied.