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| Chapter 5 |
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| Ever since Bala Joban (Childhood, Youth) (Baburao Patel, 1934), the first Indian film to be shown in Trinidad, arrived in 1935, East Indians have continued to be fascinated by this manifestation of "Indian culture". Calypso and the newer soca are important musical genres in a spectrum that includes chutney and chutney-soca, forming a crucial arena of cultural-political intervention. This chapter will discuss how all of these genres draw on Hindi film music, marking yet another area where "Indians" and "Africans" are engaged in crafting Trinidadian cultural forms. As Paul Gilroy amongst others has suggested, music is arguably the most significant cultural practice in areas of African hegemony in the New World. So much so that even in a country like Trinidad, which has a population of "Indians" more than equal to that of "Africans", Hindi film as visual product is downplayed in favour of film music which seems to have played for decades a crucial role in the formation of "Indian" identities. The Hindi films themselves have aroused a host of ambivalent responses amongst East Indians, while the songs and their many "versions" continue to circulate in diverse spaces, including Creole-dominated ones. |
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