Between Creolization and Caste: Race, Religion, and the Making of the Indo-Caribbean Diaspora

After the abolition of slavery in the British Empire in 1834, South Asians were shipped to sugar plantations across the Caribbean as indentured workers. Indentured servitude produced the Indo-Caribbean diaspora, and a new kind of racialized colonial subject—the coolie or portable migrant worker. In this paper, I draw on archival and ethnographic research in North America, the Caribbean, and South Asia to examine how religion, race, and caste shape the transcontinental history of the Indo-Caribbean diaspora. In the first part of the paper, I will investigate how the word coolie and the figure of the indentured migrant worker accrued racialized connotations in the colonial maritime archive of ship logs, captain diaries, and immigration documents. In the second section of my paper, I will trace the presence and persistence of caste in the Caribbean plantation archives, and demonstrate how, against the background of racialized forced labor, caste was reconfigured in the Caribbean sugar colonies along religious and linguistic lines. Towards the end of my paper, I will rely on my ethnographic work among the Madrasis, a religious minority within the Indo-Caribbean diaspora, to ask: Is there a Caribbean/Atlantic anti-caste movement? The Madrasis, who trace their lineage to the paraiyars (anglicized as Pariah) of southern India experienced religious persecution by the colonial state, and are often ostracized by Indo-Caribbean and South Asian American Hindu majorities today. They associate their goat-skin drums and deities like Madurai Veeran, and Kateri Amman with anti-caste work. My overall goal in this paper, then, is to connect the racialization of the coolie (or migrant worker) with the reconfiguration of caste in the Caribbean, and outline an anti-caste perspective the emerges from the Atlantic worlds shaped by the colonial horrors of enforced labor and migration, as well as possibilities of creolization and community beyond caste and race.