Mobilizing India: Women, Music, and Migration Between India and Trinidad

CASI Seminar
Tejaswini Niranjana
Senior Fellow, Centre for the Study of Culture and Society in Bangalore, India
Center for the Advanced Study of India 3600 Market Street, Suite 560 (5th floor) University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia, PA 19104

Dr. Niranjana will discuss her most recent book Mobilizing India. Descendants of Indian indentured laborers to the Caribbean comprise more than forty percent of Trinidad's population. While many Indo-Trinidadians identify themselves as Indian, what Indian signifies-about nationalism, gender, culture, caste, race, and religion-in the Caribbean is different from what it means on the subcontinent, but are intimately related. Drawing on a variety of historical and contemporary materials, Dr. Niranjana argues that perceptions of Indian female sexuality in Trinidad have long been central to the formation and disruption of dominant narratives of nationhood, modernity, and normative sexuality in India. Turning to the present, Niranjana looks to Trinidad's most dynamic site of cultural negotiation: popular music. She describes how contested ideas of Indian femininity are staged by contemporary Trinidadian musicians-male and female, of both Indian and African descent-in genres ranging from new hybrids like chutney-soca to the older but still vibrant music of Afro-Caribbean calypso.

Dr. Niranjana is the author of Siting Translation: History, Post-Structuralism, and the Colonial Context and a coeditor of Interrogating Modernity: Culture and Colonialism in India.

The Nand & Jeet Khemka Distinguished Lecture Series is an endowed public program of the Center for the Advanced Study of India (CASI). Launched in the 2007-08 academic year, and made possible through the generous support of the Nand & Jeet Khemka Foundation, the series brings renowned India specialists to the Penn community and serves as a critical forum for analyzing and understanding the complex economic, political, social, and cultural changes that the world’s largest democracy is experiencing, as well as the challenges that lie ahead.
The Saluja Global Fellows Program has been made possible by the generous gift from Vishal Saluja ENG’89 W’89. CASI was excited to launch the program during the 2022–23 academic year, coinciding with the Center’s 30th Anniversary. This new program enables CASI to invite eminent leaders and rising experts on contemporary India preferably from the fields of media, culture, law, and contemporary history to be in residence for one to two weeks at CASI.