Food, identity and migration in Indo-Caribbean culture

by Annalise Halsall,

MA Education and International Development

 

In the heat and noise of our family kitchen, I duck into the spice cupboard and inhale. Cumin, turmeric, garam masala, star anise, coriander seeds and cinnamon – the same smell as my Nani’s kitchen more than 3,000 miles away in Toronto, Canada – the same, I like to believe, as her family kitchen was another 5,000 miles away back in 1940s Berbice, Guyana.

I’ve been thinking a lot about identity, and what it means to be “Indo-Caribbean”. It’s a term that people are usually unfamiliar with, and while I can explain the standard “oh, my mum’s parents are from Guyana in the Caribbean and their great-grandparents were originally from India…”, it’s often food that gets the point home.

We eat dhals, and we eat curries, but they are less complex than what you might find in a South Indian restaurant here in London. We have roti, but it’s closer to paratha than South India or Western Indian roti (often to the confusion of South Asian friends that come over for dinner). We eat puri, but we call it bake. Our actual puri is made up of folded layers of dough like our roti, filled with coarsely ground and spiced dhal, and cooked over the high heat of the tawa. We also have rice and peas, and jerk chicken: we fry up plantain, we stew okra, we eat saltfish.

Food is a form of art, of self-expression, of identity. These recipes have been passed down through generations via an oral tradition – an informal education taking place between mother and child, grandparents and grandchildren, aunties and cousins. The tradition also traces us through our migrations and connects us to our home, even as our definition of home shifts from one generation to the next.

The beginnings of the Indo-Caribbean identity were formed when plantation owners sought a new source of cheap labour in the wake of the abolition of slavery across the British Empire in 1833. Their answer was to bring labour from one British colony to another, recruiting indentured workers from the Indian subcontinent to work in the Caribbean for a period of five years in exchange for nothing other than passage, accommodation, food and medical attention. Between 1837 and 1920, over half a million[1] workers were transported from India to the Caribbean. For many, this was the last time they saw their homeland. Only 1 in 4 are thought to have returned to India.

On the crossing from the Indian subcontinent to the Caribbean, indentured workers are written as having travelled while clutching bundles of spices to their chests; protection against the foul smells of the ship, but also a piece of home to take with them – an old comfort for a new exile in a strange land. As they settled in the Caribbean, they were confronted by unfamiliar ingredients alongside the hard labour and poor conditions faced on the plantations. The new tradition of Indian food started in the Caribbean is said to have been “born of poverty and skillful seasoning” (Mackie 1992), creating a practice of adapting the available ingredients, and making the unfamiliar familiar once more.

This triadic relationship between food, identity and migration illustrates a conceptualisation of education as identity formation: a complex process of self-knowledge and internal change. This education goes beyond the passing on of knowledge that takes place formally in schools and other institutions to include the less tangible process of self-making and knowing yourself and the world around you.

The culinary transformation signifies a personal one. In the Indo-Caribbean, food transformed in a time of necessity, as did the women preparing it as they carved out their role as not only feeders of their families, but feeders of their communities too. Indo-Caribbean women have been reforming the kitchen for generations, turning it into a site of creativity and community.

The role of food becomes an external marker of this transformation, as spices – and the security they provided – act as anchors of Indo-Caribbean immigrant history. Food in the Indo-Caribbean context was a symbol of negotiating otherness, demonstrating integration as dishes were shared between groups, yet still resisting assimilation into the dominant colonial British culture. The oral tradition of passing recipes between generations is a conduit for sharing of much more than only the knowledge of food and is an act of cultural resistance and self-expression in itself: “Each recipe serves as an intimate journal entry in which older women are able to concretize their innermost thoughts and feelings … working collaboratively with the younger women to articulate these feelings, under the guise of recipe sharing” (Mehta, 2004).

Food and spices have borne the Indo-Caribbean identity through history to today, but they are also a mechanism for individuals to reach backwards, undergoing our own transformation to gain a better understanding of our families’ past. By tracing these same recipes and methods, even if we need to swap out green mango for the unripe apples that grow in our back garden in the colder UK climate, we reconnect with a part of our identity that sometimes struggles to persist in a context where even the term “Indo-Caribbean” demands an explanation. The commonality of our spices and recipes between generations binds us together despite our vastly different settings – across continents, and across time.

Today, I continue following the oral accounts of my family’s recipes. I temper spices in hot oil: dried red chillies, garlic, and whole cumin, just like my Nani taught me, before adding it to the pot of dhal, already golden from the turmeric.

[1] This figure excludes (1) Indian indentured workers taken to colonies outside of the Caribbean (2) indentured workers brough to the Caribbean who did not originate from India (3) workers indentured under other colonial powers like Spain and the Netherlands.