Phagwah, Chutney and the Rum Syndrome

Mar 20, 2011 Features / Columnists, Ravi Dev

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Today is Phagwah.  Among the numerous “parbs” (usually translated as “festivals”) that punctuate the Hindu calendar, Holi most closely fits the English connotations of joyous celebration. Originating in hoary antiquity, Holi broadcasts the unabashed pleasure experienced by the early Hindus at the onset of spring and the end of winter. It is not for nothing that wherever there are the four seasons, winter represents death; spring life. Who does not celebrate life over death?
Maintaining the Bhojpuri culture brought over from North India, lusty Chowtaals  were sung by competing teams to the driving beats of the dholak (hand-drum) and the signature Jaals (cymbals). Over the years, the chowtaals began disappearing and Bollywood “filmi” tunes, centred on Holi would be played.
Today there will still be unbridled revelry with the dousing of all and sundry with water and abeer; the smearing of coloured powder and the sharing of delectable sweetmeats – all done in the spirit of bonhomie and good cheer. In Guyana and T&T, however, tomorrow the festivities continue, but literally in a different sprit. Tomorrow is “sport day” and the rum will flow in quantities that rival the water unleashed today. The filmi songs will now be replaced by Chutney – more precisely Chutney rum songs. The introduction of rum and its celebration in song – even in a putatively religious festival – demands explanation.
A paper by a Trinidadian academic Dr Joy Mahabir, The Poetics of Space in the Art of Mahadai Das and Adesh Samaroo, – circulating widely on Indian social blogs for months and serialised by a local newspaper last week – rehearses the historical background of both rum and chutney and their nexus. Rum, not a feature of northern rural India, was deliberately introduced to the indentured Indians as a means of immiserisation and control on the sugar plantations in the Caribbean. The reaction to alcohol is socially constructed, and for Indians, they expressed their frustrations with plantation life by venting their anger violently on each other. Violence – especially against wives and children – and alcoholism became a feature of Indian plantation life that continues into the present.
The Chutney phenomenon, grounded in the earthy Bhojpuri peasant folk songs about their lives and foibles was catapulted from the local weddings and other social/religious occasions by recordings from Surinamese Ramdeo Chaitoe in the 50s and Dropatie in the 60s that circulated widely among Indians in the Caribbean.
In 1970, Sundar Popo of T&T set the genre on its present course when he released “Nana and Nanie”. Retaining the central beat of the dholak and the dhantal, Popo introduced the modern synthesiser but more pertinently, a Creole idiom on a topical subject. It was not by accident that Popo mentioned that “Nana drinkin’ white rum and Nani drinkin’ wine”: it acknowledged the prevalence of alcohol in the Indian community.
It is not my intention to review completely the history of Chutney in this article save to note that it is a history of a gradual, inexorable commodification of what had originally been the natural, spontaneous expression of peasants to their social conditions. So we see ditty “Oh manninja, oh manninja” which expresses the despair of the housewife at how could she and her family deal with rising prices and falling wages,  transformed into a product that is sold to propel a party culture. The mention  of rum as a feature of Indian social life in Chutney to its active glorification, not coincidently occurred by the new millennium, when Chutney had moved into the national arena in T&T where the national culture is defined by Carnival  and its attendant party culture.
We cannot be surprised at the marrying of this transformation of the function of folk music to the promotion of alcohol – they are both now at the service of entrepreneurs determined to commodify and profit from all aspects of life. Over the last decade, there has been a heated debate in the Indian communities of Guyana and T&T over the impact of rum songs beginning in earnest in 2002 when Trinidadian Adesh Samaroo belted out his “Rum Till I die”. From a single performance at a carnival event Joy Mahabir evidently observed, she makes the extraordinary claim that Samaroo uses the “space of representation” Indian Chutney performers have secured in the Caribbean cultural realm to subvert the use of alcohol in the Indian community. She teaches and lives in Long Island, New York, quite far from the madding crowd.
I wish she would spend some time in Uitvlugt, the village where I live. There is hardly a month that passes when there is not one Chutney show or other – featuring Samaroo and his successors of rum songs fame, Ricky Jai, Hitman, Ravi B etc, etc. – blasting away into the wee hours of the morning. She should witness the exhortations from “the representational space” for the thousands of primarily young Indians to glorify “the drinkah”.
Returning to the licentiousness that will typify tomorrow in almost every Hindu home, I remind them that the most famous incident of Hindu drunkenness resulted in the tribe of Krishna – the Yadavs – exterminating themselves by their own hands. This may yet be the consequence of the commodification of our culture and even religion. Holi Re!!!

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