Assuming the burden of memory: The translation of Indian indenture in Peggy Mohan’s Jahajin

Abstract

This paper explores Peggy Mohan’s novel Jahajin (2007), in which she returns imaginatively to the past history of Indian indenture in order to explore its relevance and remembrance in late twentieth-century Trinidad. As Mohan’s unnamed narrator traces her family’s matrilineal involvement in this past, the novel examines the way in which Indian women, in particular, have been edited from official versions of both Trinidadian and Indian migratory histories. Jahajin’s narrator is a translator of Trinidadian Bhojpuri and, despite the difficulties of translation and challenges of accessing the Indian indentured past, this novel attests to the continued importance of oral narratives as counter-histories in facilitating the remembrance of this neglected history. Translation is also used figuratively in Jahajin to think about how Indian indenture could be “translated”, or interpreted, for twenty-first-century readers who otherwise might not have access to stories about this past. In order to examine the relationship between descendants of Indian indentured labourers and the past of indenture, I borrow Marianne Hirsch’s concept of “postmemory”, or the belated “memories” experienced by those who did not directly witness traumatic events. Postmemory is especially useful in thinking about how Mohan, and other contemporary Indian-Caribbean writers sharing an empathetic connection to this past, can explore the remembrance of Indian indenture in the absence of direct experience or its associated trauma.

In May 1838, 396 Indian men and women who would forever be known as the “Gladstone Coolies” disembarked in what was then British Guiana from the ships Hesperus and Whitby. ¹ These Indians had been brought to the Caribbean by the Guyanese plantation owner, John Gladstone (father of the British Prime Minister, William Gladstone), who had obtained permission from the President of the Board of Control for India and the Secretary of State for the Colonies to begin an emigration scheme. Under a system of indenture that continued until 1917, these migrants were the first of more than 400,000 Indian people brought to the British Caribbean, almost 144,000 of these to Trinidad alone (Vertovec, 1992: 4). ² The first 225 Indian migrants arrived in Trinidad, known to these migrants as Chinidad, or “land of sugar”, on the Fatel Rozack on 30 May, 1845 (Munasinghe, 2001: 67), though the scheme was not properly established until the 1850s. ³ The Trinidad Spectator commented on this important moment of arrival:

We congratulate our fellow Colonists on the event. We are happy to state that they have arrived in good health; only five deaths occurred during the voyage. We trust that those to whom they have been allotted will feel it to be their incumbent duty to render them as comfortable as possible. Humanity dictates this apart from any other consideration. (Besson, 1985: 33)

As this declaration sought to remind planters, they were responsible for the health and well-being of these migrants, though in such a deeply exploitative system as indenture, this writer’s call for good conduct often went unheeded.

Indentured labourers were transported from India in part to compensate for the substantial loss of African labour in the period following the emancipation of African slaves in the British Caribbean in 1834. Even before this date, planters had imported labourers from places like China, Madeira, Germany, and England, but without much success. However, as Steven Vertovec has argued, the importation of Indian labour may also have been for reasons more manipulative than a depleted African work force:

after abolition, by increasing calls for cheap, controllable labour from outside their respective colonies (even in times of actual low labour need), planters could ensure depressed agricultural wages within the colony and could mitigate against the possibility of the African ex-slaves becoming a proletariat class which might threaten production and profits by making demands and withholding labour. (Vertovec, 1992: 2)

Despite the vast numbers involved in this mass relocation of Indian men, women, and children to the British Caribbean, the past of the Indian indentured labourer is a curiously neglected one. If Britain’s involvement in the transatlantic slave trade has still not been afforded the due amount of historical representation (which is something I have argued in previous work), the role played by Indian indentured labourers is especially overlooked (Ward, 2011). ⁴ Contemporary Britain’s reluctance to be associated with instigating and perpetuating the lucrative slave trade may be seen in its prolonged emphasis in received historical accounts on the role played by British abolitionists and the drive to end the institution. Indian indentured workers played a crucial role in the Caribbean’s economic, cultural, and social life during the period of indenture, often labouring in conditions close to those of slavery, and the legacy of this role is evident in the region’s continuing rich ethnic and cultural diversity and outstanding Indian-Caribbean creative output — but slavery continues to be conceptualized as a history of black and white.

Yet, as early as 1840, the British politician (and later, Prime Minister) Lord John Russell had referred to this system of indenture as a “new system of slavery”. ⁵ There were, as David Northrup has argued, “striking resemblances” between the systems of slavery and indenture: “Especially in the early years of the trade, many indentured labourers were recruited through kidnapping and coercion or were seriously misled by unscrupulous recruiters about their destinations, duties, and compensation” (Northrup, 1955: 5). Hugh Tinker made a similar observation that Indian indenture was a system of exploitation on which “[t]he taint of slavery would always linger” (Tinker, 1974: 334). Indians were transported in overcrowded vessels, and mortality rates on board the ships were frequently high. Once in the Caribbean, indentured labourers initially often lived in the same accommodation and did identical work to the former slaves, although there were significant differences between the two systems, too. It is important to remember that, unlike slavery, Indian indenture was largely a voluntary migration, and labourers were not considered the property of plantation owners; indenture was (on paper, at least) for a fixed period, and their children were born free (though parents were often coerced to sign them into indenture). As Morton Klass has observed, while many labourers were misled by recruiters, there were significant factors propelling their migration: “A few came for the adventure; a few to escape the law; a few because of family conflicts — but most came because food, money, and employment were scarce at home” (Klass, 1961: 9).

However, whilst Kris Rampersad has described the “flowering of IndoTrinidadian literature” since the 1950s (Rampersad, 2003: 3), only recently have Indian-Trinidadian authors explored the past of Indian indenture. As Véronique Bragard recognizes, “If the first generation of Indo-Caribbean writers, which includes major writers such as V. S. Naipaul or Sam Selvon, greatly contributed to the emergence and assertion of the Caribbean literary creativeness, they did not revisit what has been called the Second Middle Passage and the servitude that followed” (Bragard, 1998: 99). My focus in this paper, therefore, is on a “second-generation” Indian-Trinidadian writer, Peggy Mohan, whose novel Jahajin (2007) returns imaginatively to this past in order to explore Indian indenture’s remembrance, or the ways in which it continues to “haunt” late twentieth-century Trinidad. In this respect, Mohan’s work joins a growing collection of Caribbean novels examining the role of Indian indenture in the region’s past, which includes Sharlow Mohammed’s The Promise (1995), David Dabydeen’s The Counting House (1996), and Ramabai Espinet’s The Swinging Bridge (2003). Mohan’s creative approach is similar to Espinet’s; each writer examines how Indian women, in particular, have been edited from official versions of both Trinidadian and Indian migratory histories, or what Brinda Mehta has referred to as “women’s alienation and exilic dispositions within patriarchal and colonial systems of power” (Mehta, 2004: 155). In The Swinging Bridge, Espinet highlights the spectrality of Indian words in the current Trinidadian vocabulary, as being urgent signals of the past in the present: “Words are ghosts, ancestors on this side. […] They are alive and sensate — full of flesh and stone and jagged edges. Word jumbies” (Espinet, 2004/2003: 5). The haunting nature of Trinidad’s Indianness leads Espinet’s narrator into a project of translation into English her great-grandmother’s Hindi songs of migration and indenture.

Whilst in The Swinging Bridge the translation of songs offers an important corrective to the official, and patriarchal, version of the past which minimizes or conceals the role played by single migrating Indian women, translation is a concept even more central to Mohan’s novel. Jahajin’s narrator is a translator of Trinidadian Bhojpuri — a language similar to Hindi that is spoken mainly in north-eastern India and brought to Trinidad by indentured migrants. Despite the difficulties of translation and challenges of accessing the Indian indentured past, this novel attests to the continued importance of oral narratives as counter-histories in facilitating the remembrance of this neglected history. Translation is also used figuratively in Jahajin to think about how Indian indenture could be “translated”, or interpreted, for twenty-first-century readers, who otherwise might not have access to stories about this past. There is, therefore, a self-consciousness about Mohan’s depiction of recovery work. As Mariam Pirbhai has argued,

Indo-Caribbean women novelists arguably work in tandem with historians in the memorialisation and excavation of women’s narratives, for they not only strive to fill in historical gaps but also to mobilize these stories as models of cultural and feminist agency for present generations. (Pirbhai, 2010: 47)

Mohan may be seen to be one of Pirbhai’s Indian-Caribbean women novelists working on “the memorialisation and excavation of women’s narratives”, but she has also created in Jahajin a protagonist undertaking a similar kind of recovery work. This self-consciousness is made more explicit by the revelation that the novel is partly autobiographical — as Mohan acknowledges at the start of her tale: “At the heart of this story are all the old people from Central Trinidad who spoke Bhojpuri into my tape recorder back in the 1970s” (Mohan, 2007: ix). ⁶ Whilst Mohan has written as a linguist about the need to “understand language death unsentimentally, because the big purge of world languages has already begun” (Mohan and Zador, 1986: 318), her novel foregrounds the importance — in the certainty of Bhojpuri’s eventual erasure in Trinidad — of documenting and translating these Bhojpuri stories as a testament, or literary monument, to women’s roles in the past of indenture. For Mohan’s narrator, the translated stories of the past of indenture raise pertinent issues to do with witnessing and the burden of collective memory, concerns also arguably motivating Mohan’s fictional exploration of the Bhojpuri stories she heard as a translator.

Jahajin’s title foregrounds the importance of relationships forged on the journey from India to Trinidad, or voyage across the kala pani. ⁷ Deeda — an elderly Bhojpuri-speaking woman who travelled from India to Trinidad to work as an indentured labourer — explains to the narrator that, on the voyage,

[they] started calling each other something new: jahaji bhai and jahaji bahin, ship-brother and ship-sister, and speaking of each other as jahajis, shipmates. People who travelled across two big oceans on the same ship had seen too much together to be anything but family. (82)

As we shall see, as the narrator works to translate, and understand, the past of indenture and her own family’s role in this past, she too becomes a “shipmate”, empathizing and identifying more and more closely with her indentured great-great-grandmother, though I argue this is a process of identification that is not without problems.

In exploring the idea of translation, Mohan goes further than merely including as a protagonist a translator; she provides substantial phrases, or sometimes complete paragraphs, in Bhojpuri before offering an English translation. We can see this method at work in the following passage, where Deeda is telling a folk story about a heroine called Saranga:

“Ego baanar rahal an ego banariya, du-jana.” There were once two monkeys, a male and a female.

“Ta duno jana baithal rahal ego daar par, aa tarey rahal… reeba. Nadiya. Pani.” They were both seated on a branch and below them was… a river. Water. (6–7)

Whilst, in this passage, the Bhojpuri may be seen to attest to the “authenticity” of the account, I would suggest this bilingualism serves at least two further purposes. First, it acts as a reminder of the importance of the original Indian language so, although the novel is written mainly in English, Bhojpuri is given a space in the book. Secondly, in the terms of translation studies, the text may be said to be “foreignized” (Schleiermacher, 1977/1813). ⁸

The German theologian and philosopher Friedrich Schleiermacher argued in 1813 that there were only two methods of translation: “Either the translator leaves the author in peace, as much as possible, and moves the reader towards him; or he leaves the reader in peace, as much as possible, and moves the author towards him” (Schleiermacher, 1977/1813: 77). The use of Bhojpuri in Jahajin may be seen to “foreignize” the text — it leaves “the author” (or here, Deeda — the storyteller) in peace, and moves the reader of Jahajin closer to the Indian-Trinidadian context. The Saranga story can be seen as fictionalizing the migrants’ journey from India to Trinidad; in the above quotation, the “pani”, or river, may represent the kala pani or oceans across which the migrants travelled. In addition to drawing the reader nearer to the original background and culture of the work, for Lawrence Venuti, foreignizing translation plays a supplementary role in seeking to halt what he calls the “ethnocentric violence” of translation: “Foreignizing translation in English can be a form of resistance against ethnocentrism and racism, cultural narcissism and imperialism, in the interests of democratic, geopolitical relations” (Venuti, 1995: 20). ⁹ Whilst Mohan provides a translation of the majority of Bhojpuri words in this novel, the very fact that she makes room for Bhojpuri in her work suggests a similar desire to resist the hegemony of the colonial language. In a text which seeks to explore the role played by a group of people who were marginalised and disempowered in Trinidad’s colonial past, Mohan’s use of Bhojpuri may be read as part of a particularly resistant authorial strategy and an important political reminder of the existence of “India in the Caribbean” (Dabydeen and Samaroo, 1987).

The narrator’s interest in Bhojpuri is portrayed as being unusual on the island; relatively few people are able to understand the language and, when she finds work in the Linguistics department of the University of the West Indies, her task is described as being “to demystify the alien sounds still heard around the sugar estates” (45). This is an interesting choice of words — “alien” indicates that Bhojpuri remains a foreign presence in Trinidad, a spectre of the Indian past which is forever associated with the canefields. This notion that Bhojpuri is a foreign or alien intruder may be thought of in relation to the apparent “alienness” of the Indian presence in Trinidad, which can be explained by a variety of factors, including the relative lateness of Indian arrival to the Caribbean (coming after slavery and European indentured workers); the roles played by Indian workers on the plantations (doing work previously undertaken by slaves), and the lack of social integration between Indian- and African-Trinidadians (particularly in the nineteenth and early twentieth century), which was exacerbated by differences in religions and languages. As Marina Carter and Khal Torabully have argued, “Colonial societies hitherto composed of Creoles and Europeans, united, at least superficially, by language and religion, did not readily or quickly accept the presence of ‘aliens’ in their midst” (Carter and Torabully, 2002: 62).

Mohan’s choice of a translator as protagonist is noteworthy, given that, in most literary texts, translators tend to be invisible figures. ¹⁰ As Melissa Wallace has observed, “so highly valued is the imperceptibility of the translator’s mark, in today’s literary world, that literary translations are praised by reviewers precisely for how invisible the translator manages to remain” (Wallace, 2002: 65) [emphasis in original]. The translator’s visibility in Jahajin provides the reader with a postmodern awareness of the crucial role played by the translator when trying to understand the past of indenture; if the reader is aware of the autobiographical content of the novel then its metafictionality, as a translator’s novel about a translator, is even clearer. The necessity of translation reveals that the personal histories and stories of this past cannot be accessed outside the Bhojpuri-speaking community without mediation. In this way, it also serves to highlight the role of the translator in conveying culture and preserving a dying language. In recording onto tape Deeda’s stories, the narrator safeguards oral narratives and Trinidadian Bhojpuri speech patterns that would in all likelihood otherwise eventually be lost. As Peter Manuel has explained, although initially “Bhojpuri Hindi […], in a slightly creolized form, became the East Indian lingua franca”, by the mid-twentieth century, “Bhojpuri was becoming restricted to the older generations” (Manuel, 2000: 6). The subsequent translation of these stories allows the narrator to share narratives (with, for example, the historian Rosa) that might otherwise not be heard.

Deeda’s recollections need to be listened to and preserved because they offer a counter-narrative to received remembrance of Indian indenture. The narrator is initially surprised to learn, for example, that many Indian women had travelled alone to the Caribbean during this period:

[A]s I listened to their conversation the migration came across to me as a story of women making their way alone, with men in the background, strangers, extras. In the history books it had always been the other way around: it was the men who were the main actors. But there was also this unwritten history of the birth of a new community in Trinidad. And it was women who were at the centre of the story.

The best things never did get on tape. (204)

Whilst Deeda’s narrative provides a corrective to the received history of Indian migration to Trinidad, she is a subaltern figure in this novel, and it would seem that no one previously listened to her stories. This quotation also recognizes the limits of translation; despite the narrator’s attempt to capture the “truth” of migration from India to Trinidad in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the “best things” always evade the translator. Just as there can be no return to the past, it is also impossible to capture the experiences of Indian indentured migrants; the novel gestures to the partiality of what is recorded either by the translator or the historian. Indeed, in making this comparison between recording stories on tape and writing history, the narrator casts herself into the role of revisionary historian.

As she learns more about the language, the narrator comes to realize that Trinidadian Bhojpuri is closest to the Bhojpuri of the Basti district in India, and the majority of migrants from this area during the peak time of indenture were women. Her role in translating, and examining, Bhojpuri is therefore intimately connected to uncovering a neglected part of history in which women were not only pioneers in terms of migration to Trinidad, but also in the development of Bhojpuri in its new Caribbean context. It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that the Bhojpuri Saranga stories and songs she learns from Deeda privilege women’s concerns and experiences, though the narrator notes: “That isn’t typical. What you’re supposed to get in a Bhojpuri folktale is undying loyalty and submissiveness” (104). Her claims can be supported by those working on Bhojpuri folktales, such as K. D. Upadhyaya, who has explained that, usually in Bhojpuri tales,

women do not possess a very high position in society. They are treated as a personal property of the man who can dispose of them in any manner he likes. The wife has no separate existence apart from the husband who is all powerful. (Upadhyaya, 1968: 83)

The Bhojpuri stories in Jahajin suggest a picture of Indian women as pioneers to a new country; shedding not only their homelands and ways of life, but often also husbands. As Marianne D. Soares Ramesar has explained, rather than Indian women being routinely kidnapped and sold into indenture, “the majority of women emigrants had already broken away from home and adopted independent lives as wives deserted or escaping from bad husbands or tyrannical mother-in-laws, or as widows” (Ramesar, 1994: 23). The Bhojpuri narratives offer a similar view of Indian and Indian-Trinidadian womanhood in terms of independence, defiance, and vision.

Jahajin is interested in both literal and metaphorical journeys, and translation is also used figuratively as a symbol of the importance of “crossings”, such as the need for reciprocal understanding in encounters with those of different cultural backgrounds. Salman Rushdie famously argued in “Imaginary Homelands” (1991) that “The word ‘translation’ comes, etymologically, from the Latin for ‘bearing across’. Having been borne across the world, we are translated men” (Rushdie, 1991/1982: 17). ¹¹ Rushdie’s comments capture the necessity of adaptation and transculturation at the heart of the concept of diaspora, though unlike Rushdie, Mohan’s novel is specifically concerned with the idea of translated women, and how their role in Indian migration to Trinidad, in its omission from received historical accounts and official memory, is perhaps a mistranslation of the past.

In thinking about Rushdie’s “translated men”, it is also important to recognize that such migrants are not merely being translated, or the subjects of others’ translations — they are active participants in this process. As Sherry Simon has been quick to emphasize, the idea of “translated men” is far removed from a passive identity position:

We can understand this expression to highlight the fact that individuals who move from one culture to another are transformed by the many cultural references they collect and reposition. Their selfhood and identity are destabilized and refashioned as they negotiate new realities. But migrants are also active agents of cultural exchange; they “translate as they are ‘translated’”. (Simon, 2000: 22) ¹²

Robert Young has fruitfully extended this debate, arguing that translation “becomes central to the migrant’s experience in the metropolitan or postcolonial city”, adding: “Having translated themselves, migrants then encounter there other translated men and women, other restless marginals, and translate their experiences to each other to form new languages of desire and affirmation: circuits of activism, circuits of desire” (Young, 2003: 142). For Young, translation is central to the creation of adaptive diasporic identities, and promotes cross-cultural exchange and understanding. Within the timeframe of Jahajin, such cross-cultural trades are most obviously to be found between the protagonist and her boyfriend Fyzie, and also Rosa (both of whom are African-Caribbean), though these connections appear to be rarely straightforward, and the narrator finds herself subject to criticism and disapproval for her choice of a black boyfriend or, in her grandmother’s words, her “relationship with ‘all kind of dog and cat’” (112).

Notwithstanding the difficulties of such connections, the novel may be seen as testifying to the importance of translation in making possible future “circuits” of transracial and transcultural understanding. One of the most striking moments in the novel suggesting transracial connection, and even harmony, is during carnival, when the float of an African-Trinidadian friend of the narrator is devised as a sailing ship, carrying jahajis from India. The narrator had earlier learned from Deeda that she and Sunnariya had sailed to Trinidad on a ship called Godavari; accordingly, she names the carnival boat the same. Despite the performers’ interest in the historical past, there is a playfulness in their approach to history — the participants are not compelled to stick to the “facts”, as the narrator notes: “The bulk of the band would be costumed as jahajis, wearing dhotis and bright pagris if they were men, and ghangri-joola-ornhis in bright colours if they were women. The actual jahajins had worn saris. Well, these costumes looked better in a Carnival band” (218).

Just as the costumes are creatively “inauthentic”, so too the ship is historically inaccurate: “The real Godavari had been a steamer made of steel, big and ugly, Deeda had said. But this wooden ship looked better” (219). It would appear the emphasis is on creativity and aesthetics, not historical re-enactment or factuality. This float suggests a hybridity, or coming together of African- and Indian-Caribbean peoples and traditions, which extends to its musical accompaniment. The narrator describes the supporting carnival band: “Along with the steel band that supplied the Calypso music, they had added a whole lot of dholaks and tassas for the rhythm” (218). The inclusion of Indian percussion instruments into the steelband implies an embracing of Indian-Trinidadian traditions into a wider national sense of Trinidadian culture which is largely absent from the rest of the novel. The carnival float seems an appropriate and imaginative response to history, as a hybrid mixing of styles, traditions, and people:

Tuesday afternoon the good people of Chaguanas came out to play Carnival and saw before them a hybrid ship, backed by a hybrid orchestra, taking over the road. And behind the ship was a band full of modern-day jahajis jumping up on the road to music. (220)

This performativity ensures not only “the past and the present moving in step” (225), but also suggests that black and Indian people are coming together in a blend of pasts and cultures to celebrate carnival, leading the way for a more racially mixed and cooperative Trinidad. The float may thus be read as a contemporary translation of the past of indenture — it is creative, adaptive, and permits those of different races to remember and celebrate the arrival of Indians on the island.

The dancing “modern-day jahajis”, followed by their hybrid ghost ship, appear as a celebratory symbol of the past of Indian arrival and settlement, but as the narrator learns more about her ancestor’s life as an indentured labourer, the clearer it becomes that this past haunts the present in more subtle ways, too. For example, when the narrator and a friend steal cane from the fields her cousin responds with the line: “You can take the coolie out of the cane field,[…] but you can’t take the cane field out of the coolie” (95), which leads the narrator to reflect:

It was funny how, on the one hand, we lionized our ancestors who had worked in the cane fields, yet on the other hand we kept our own evolved selves light years away from the sugar estates. Our hearts bled for the poor aging cane cutters, the last repository of “our” culture. But to go near the life of the estates was to place your feet too close to the quicksand.

We had come a long way. We were not going to be dragged back down. (95)

This is a telling quotation, which signals the narrator’s anxiety about the past of Indian indenture as being both “a long way” away, but also quite clearly too close for comfort. Similarly, her grandfather had discouraged her from learning Bhojpuri, as “a thing of the past, a tie to the estate” (51). Yet, as we shall see, the narrator’s growing interest in, and translation of, the past of Indian indenture ultimately allows her to reach a fuller sense of her own identity, though the concerns expressed above over the dangers of being “dragged back down” are not without cause.

Before the narrator is able to establish a stronger, more assertive, sense of self, she needs first to explore her empathy for her indentured great-great-grandmother Sunnariya. From Deeda, she learns of Sunnariya’s sexual assault by a drunken Scottish overseer, who had accused her of stealing cane. This was a commonplace occurrence on the plantations; indeed, as Verene A. Shepherd has explained, “the sexual exploitation of women in this period did not reflect only white but also black and Indian masculinity in action” (Shepherd, 2002: 26). Soon after hearing this tale, the narrator has the following encounter at a social club on the island:

As I strolled around in my swimsuit through what looked like a covered shed with a billiards table, a man looked up and considered me for a long moment. Sheila had waved out to him, had told me he was an overseer. From Scotland.

“Are you a member here?”

I freaked, and said something or the other and vanished into the women’s changing room. I locked myself inside a cubicle and wrapped the towel tightly around me […]

I wanted to dispel the image of the overseer focusing his eyes on me through an alcoholic haze, sizing me up. Deciding if I belonged or not. Like, was I some Indian girl poaching on his property? (164–5)

In seeking to unpack what is happening in this quotation, in which the narrator appears to be experiencing a kind of historic flashback to Sunnariya’s encounter with the Scottish overseer, we might turn to the work of theorists interrogating notions of trauma and memory within the context of the Holocaust. Whilst this setting appears far removed from that of Indian indenture, and it is important not to minimize these contextual differences, or homogenize trauma, those writing about the Holocaust provide ways of thinking about trauma and its inheritance that may further our comprehension of the legacies and ongoing effects of Indian indenture. In particular, Marianne Hirsch’s concept of postmemory, or the belated “memories” experienced by those who did not directly witness traumatic events, appears extremely pertinent to understanding this moment. As Hirsch explains: “Postmemory is defined through an identification with the victim or witness of trauma, modulated by an admission of an unbridgeable distance separating the participant from the one born after” (Hirsch, 2002: 76). For Hirsch, this is not direct memory, but one that is passed through generations, and intimately connected to trauma. It cannot, of course, be a literal memory, but instead is a creative response to the trauma and memories of others, so postmemory’s “connection to the past is thus not actually mediated by recall but by imaginative investment, projection, and creation” (Hirsch, 2008: 107).

Hirsch has been keen to stress that postmemory is a concept neither confined in its usefulness to thinking about the Holocaust (Hirsch, 2001: 11), nor limited to those who are biologically related, employing Geoffrey Hartman’s phrase “witnesses by adoption” (Hirsch, 2002: 76). ¹³ In The Longest Shadow: In the Aftermath of the Holocaust (1996) Hartman defines this phrase as follows:

[T]he children and now grandchildren of the survivors, as well as those who have become witnesses by adoption (who have adopted themselves into the family of victims), seek a new way to deal with a massively depressing event. They cannot testify with the same sense of historical participation, for it did not happen to them. This does not lessen, however, a moral and psychological burden. Despite missing memories […] they look for a legacy, or a strong identification with what happened. (Hartman, 1996: 8) [emphasis in original]

As this quotation suggests, like Hirsch, Hartman is interested in the generations that follow traumatic survivors, who respond to an inherited or “adopted” collective trauma by seeking to identify with the victims. Whilst Hartman’s context is, again, that of the Holocaust, we can see how these ideas of witnessing and memory may be relevant when thinking about the Indian-Caribbean generations that followed their indentured ancestors’ traumatic separation from India and their labour in unforgiving conditions in a hostile and unfamiliar country. For Hirsch, Hartman’s term is principally valuable because of its extension of bonds of connectivity:

I like the connection to and enlargement of family that this term implies, the acknowledged break in biological transmission. Postmemory thus would be retrospective witnessing by adoption. It is a question of adopting the traumatic experiences — and thus also the memories — of others as experiences one might oneself have had, and thus of inscribing them into one’s own life story. (Hirsch, 2002: 76) [emphasis in original]

In writing about the possibility for postmemory as a potential space for cultural or collective trauma, Hirsch extends the possibilities for empathy. Postmemory is especially useful in thinking about how Mohan, and other contemporary Indian-Caribbean writers who feel an empathetic connection to this past, can explore the remembrance of Indian indenture in the absence of direct experience or associated trauma. As David Dabydeen has phrased it: “I’m living in the twentieth century in a position of privilege; nobody ever beat me, I never cut cane, I don’t know the weight of a cutlass” (Dawes, 1997/1994: 180).

However, this “empathetic” approach to the past is not without problems. The dangers of an over-empathetic, or appropriative response to another’s trauma have prompted Dominick LaCapra to urge for what he has termed “empathetic unsettlement”:

I would argue that the response of even secondary witnesses (including historians) to traumatic events must involve empathic unsettlement that should register in one’s very mode of address in ways revealing both similarities and differences across genres (such as history and literature). But a difficulty arises when the virtual experience involved in empathy gives way to vicarious victimhood, and empathy with the victim seems to become an identity. (LaCapra, 1999: 47)

It would seem there is a danger in the conflation of very separate identity positions, where an over-empathetic response to trauma from the historian or writer — or, in the case of Jahajin, translator — may lead to an inappropriate identification with the figure of the victim, or a “vicarious victimhood”. This appears to be the precarious line that Mohan’s protagonist navigates, as empathetically she finds her way back into the past of indenture. In the above quotation from Jahajin, Mohan’s caution in describing this historic flashback, or moment of postmemory, is evident in her choice of language — to reiterate, the narrator reports that she “freaked”, and wonders: “Like, was I some Indian girl poaching on his property?” (164–5). This use of a late-twentieth-century colloquial vocabulary and syntax firmly reminds the reader of the contemporary setting of the novel, and maintains a crucial distance between Sunnariya’s past and the narrator’s present. Whilst the narrator’s meeting with the Scottish man appears to be reminiscent of Sunnariya’s encounter with the overseer, it is short-lived, and a clear distinction is made between the trauma experienced by Sunnariya and the narrator’s empathy for her indentured ancestor.

In Jahajin, in addition to the possible inappropriateness of embracing another’s trauma, and the loosening, or unravelling, of the narrator’s sense of identity, there is an additional problem in too closely relating to Sunnariya, which is her passivity. As Nesha Haniff has argued, the first female Indian indentured migrants to Trinidad enjoyed a freedom and independence that later generations of Indian-Caribbean women were denied (Haniff, 1999: 21). Unlike Deeda, who welcomes the benefits offered by her new Caribbean location, Sunnariya is portrayed as being reluctant to assume the comparative liberation available to Indian women in Trinidad in the early days of indenture. Following her molestation by another overseer, whom her father kills, authorities agree to send her father back to India, in exchange for sparing his life. Blaming herself for the overseer’s attack, and wracked with guilt, Sunnariya agrees to marry her father’s choice of husband, whom she does not love. Deeda tries to convince Sunnariya to make her own decisions, telling her: “this is a different country. And your father is not here. The only way for women like us to manage in this place is to hold the wheel for ourselves” (172), but soon realizes the futility of this approach. Sunnariya endures an unfulfilled and loveless marriage before her premature death in labour with her fifth child.

Whilst Sunnariya may be a problematic role model for the modern Indian-Trinidadian woman, the overall effect of the narrator’s identification with her is to suggest a connectivity between the past and present, particularly concerning choices for women. The narrator is presented with a series of options; she needs to decide not only between the men in her life — or, as her cousin puts it, between the prince and the monkey — but also whether to settle in Trinidad, return to the United States where she has been studying, or travel to India. Towards the end of the novel, she realizes that she can no longer defer making these decisions, and must take control over her life, in a way that Sunnariya felt unable to:

I was not going to make the next generation sail the high seas for me. The curse had to end.

I was going to pilot the ship out of the storm myself and find it a safe harbour. (200)

Here, the narrator is aware that she needs to break the cycle of “inherited” trauma and female submission, and determine her own future or, as Deeda had urged, “hold the wheel” (172). Jahajin is concerned with negotiating identities — the female characters must weather the storm of Indian-Trinidadian patriarchy, and not only take control of their lives, but — importantly — ensure that their decisions enable a peaceful journey’s end, or “safe harbour”. The translation of the Indian indentured past is a vital part of this process, in allowing the narrator to recognize that her initial refusal to take control over her destiny had dangerous historical echoes in Sunnariya’s story of acquiescence.

However, uncovering, and hence remembering, the Indian indentured past by translation is not a straightforward act. Douglas Howland has explained that translation is rarely an uncomplicated process:

Translation is no longer a simple transfer of words or texts from one language to another, on the model of the bilingual dictionary, or the bridging of language differences between people. Rather than a straightforward operation performed on words, translation has become a translingual act of transcoding cultural material — a complex act of communication. (Howland, 2003: 45)

This complexity is all too evident to the narrator of Jahajin — she records, for example, that unlike her grandmother, who is entirely fluent in Bhojpuri, she needs facial and body language, as well as words, to understand. This translation appears to be an unusually demanding project; on one occasion, the narrator refers to the job of translating and interpreting the stories in terms of stripping and bundling sugar cane: “Rosa went into the kitchen, and I followed her there. I think she was tired too. I had been stripping and cleaning the text for her all day, without a break, and she had been making the bundles” (125). Once again, the concept of postmemory appears helpful in reading this moment. The narrator’s involvement in translating Deeda’s stories seems to have drawn her into experiencing a postmemory of indenture, where she is left exhausted after her physical toil of translating-as-working-the-cane. As the narrator reveals:

Normally I didn’t take any sugar in my tea. But after all the hard work of the day, this evening I put three spoons of sugar into my tea and stirred.

Then I remembered that Mukoon Singh was going to come for his tea any minute now. I sat up straight and looked out the window, and waited. (125)

We may recall that, for Hirsch and Hartman, postmemories were not necessarily limited to persons biologically related. In the above passage, the narrator has “become” Deeda, who was awaiting the return of Sunnariya’s father, Mukoon Singh. Earlier, she had similarly disclosed: “I had the eerie feeling that I had slipped through a gap and become Deeda. I actually remembered walking into Garden Reach depot and squatting under the thatched roofs that evening and looking out at the rain” (26–7). These moments appear to suggest an over-empathetic identification with Deeda, where Deeda’s memories have been appropriated by the narrator, and may be read as an example of LaCapra’s “vicarious victimhood” or, in response to Hartman’s earlier idea of “witnesses by adoption”, what Froma I. Zeitlin has called “an obsessive quest to assume the burden of memory, of rememoration, by means of which one might become a witness oneself” (Zeitlin, 1998: 6). Both Hartman and Zeitlin employ the word “burden” to describe this process of assuming another’s memories, which echoes the narrator’s earlier fears that “to go near the life of the estates was to place your feet too close to the quicksand” (95). It reflects the fact that such “witnessing” is not a light-hearted trip into the recollections of others, but an emotionally exhausting and onerous undertaking, and raises the question of what is to be done with such “memories”. As the narrator of Fred D’Aguiar’s novel about the Zong slave-ship massacre of 1781, Feeding the Ghosts (1997), realizes, “All the knowledge has done is to burden me” (D’Aguiar, 1998/1997: 229).

Crucially, in Mohan’s novel, Bhojpuri appears instrumental in “assum[ing] the burden of memory” and understanding the past. Listening to the Bhojpuri stories permits the narrator to “time travel” to the extent we have just seen, where postmemory takes over and she has “adopted” Deeda’s memories. Judith Kestenberg has found the notion of “identification” insufficient when describing the relationship between Holocaust survivors and later generations, writing: “The mechanism goes beyond identification. I have called it ‘transposition’ into the world of the past, similar — but not identical — to the spiritualist’s journey into the world of the dead” (cited in Hirsch, 2002: 74). We may borrow this theory to understand the narrator of Jahajin’s relationship with the memories of Deeda and Sunnariya, where translating the Bhojpuri stories imaginatively propels her back to the time of Indian indenture in Trinidad. The notion of visiting with the dead also brings a new dimension to the idea of being “haunted” by the past of Indian indenture.

If this concept of “transposition” may enable present-day Trinidadians to connect to the past of indenture, the narrator is able to go a step further in actually travelling to India when, towards the end of the novel, she is awarded a research grant to study Bhojpuri. In portraying her narrator’s journey to India, Mohan is unusual among Indian-Caribbean writers. In his essay “Still Arriving: The Assimilationist Indo-Caribbean Experience of Marginality” (1992), and referring to such authors as Sam Selvon, V. S. Naipaul, Harold Sonny Ladoo, and Neil Bissoondath, Victor Ramraj writes:

None of these novelists portrays major characters who are seriously contemplating a return to India; they create a few secondary characters who feel alienated in the Caribbean and dream of India but hesitate to make the final commitment to return, fearing that they no longer would be at home even in India. (Ramraj, 1992: 77–8)

Mohan’s approach is novel; there is little to indicate her narrator will fail to settle in India, and it is a place that holds considerable power in her imagination. She discloses that India is part of a “fantasy world” she had shared with her grandmother (127), a phrase that recalls Rushdie’s notion of “imaginary homelands, Indias of the mind” (Rushdie, 1991/1982: 10). As the narrator is going to visit the Bhojpuri-speaking Basti district, where Deeda once lived, Mohan explores a moment of “return” to India. Due to her age and frailty, Deeda is literally unable to travel, but asks the narrator to take a cassette tape of her Saranga story to play when she reaches her village. In this way, Deeda is able to enact a symbolic return to her homeland:

[S]he wanted to see her story return first of all to the place she had left. She wanted, through her story, to pass on the news that she was still alive, but in a different universe.

The story could not end with the heroine still in exile. So she was sending back her Saranga, her more fanciful self. (203)

When the narrator finds the village, she meets an old man willing to listen to Deeda’s Saranga story, with which he is familiar. Remarkably, this turns out to be Deeda’s husband, whom she left in India when she migrated. He participates in the songs and — as the narrator describes — the effect of playing the story in India is of a link between worlds:

I waited a few minutes for the reverb from the story to die down inside my head. All of a sudden I felt lighter than air. The old man sat too, willing the dream to go on….

I reached out and pressed stop: the bridge across two great oceans to Deeda’s little house in Orange Valley disappeared. (267)

The imagery here is that of connection: the story makes possible bridges between Trinidad and India, and between the past and the present. His listening provides a crucial audience for Deeda’s stories — a reminder that the subaltern needs to be heard (Spivak, 1999: 308). But, of course, this moment, as a “dream”, is both unreal and fleeting — the instant the tape is stopped, the connection is gone, recalling the separation between diasporic homelands and places of “origin” — there can be no return.

Although this passage indicates only a transitory moment of connection, it is significant that Deeda’s stories are understood by her husband, unmediated and without the need for translation, perhaps suggesting that the gap between the diasporan and those at “home” is in fact less significant than the gap between past and present. It would seem in Jahajin that, whilst Mohan is involved in a process of translation of the Indian indentured past in the present, this translation primarily aids not those of different cultures, but those of different Indian-Trinidadian generations. Maria Tymoczko has argued that, in addition to its ability to connect those of different cultures, “translation in a postcolonial context can mediate across languages within a single group, functioning to connect a people with its past, for example, more than to connect one people with another” (Tymoczko, 2006: 16) [emphasis in original]. I propose that it is this kind of temporal, or historical, connection that we see in the narrator’s work in Jahajin, in enabling younger Trinidadians to relate to older generations of Indian-Trinidadians and also the more distant Indian indentured past. However, as we have seen, this translation is tricky work; the stories are fragmented and challenging — the narrator’s grasp on this past is tentative. There are many puzzles or blanks which require from the translator analysis, interpretation, and — ultimately — imagination. Though labouring under the burden of memory, recording and translating the Bhojpuri stories enable her both to construct from these ruins the Indian indentured past, and truly comprehend her place in the Trinidadian present.