In Trinidad the rituals are at the center personal and subjective. From this subjective core, we move to the kinship unit or family circle within which ritualistic and customary activities occur in the esoteric, private realm of the “yard” compound. From here we move out to the tertiary ring of the small community of Shi‘i worshippers on the island. In a largely Shi‘i-populated country such as Iran, one would expect the circular ripples to end here, but Trinidad, being a polyethnic island, offers further ripples to consider. From the circle of the community of Shi‘i worshippers, we move to the public or exoteric sphere of the fourth circle, which is the ethnic domain. It is on this level of discourse that non-Shi‘i Indo-Trinidadians may claim the esoteric rite as a secular Indian pageant. Next comes the circle of the nation-state. As more and more Trinidadians of non-Indian descent become involved in the public display and performance of the Hosay rituals, the spectacle moves from the ethnic to the national realm. If we are to place Hosay in a transnational context, however, we need to engulf the inner circles with a globally constituted one that connects the innermost three spheres to the all-encompassing outer circle. Within this larger sphere of concentric circles, Caribbean Shi‘i Muslims become part of a worldwide community of worshippers, for better or for worse. The fairly recent impact of orthodox Shi‘i missionary activity on the island is the subject for my closing reflections in the epilogue on ideological challenges confronting Hosay participants after more than 150 years of residency.
In deploying the metaphor of ripples on a pond, I do not envision a seamless stream of harmonious continuity emanating from a quiet center. Rather, we may wish to imagine another pebble dropped at the periphery, which would lead to a collision between the rings bursting forth from the center and those moving inward from the periphery. This more complicated picture is more consonant with the quote from James Clifford that opened this Introduction. The image of colliding concentric rings offers an opportunity to look deeper at the contentions that have surrounded the event over time and across space.
The discourses revolving around issues of pious observance versus antinomian celebration and ethnic pageant versus national culture are serious points of contention in Trinidad, and it is through the discourses surrounding these debates that meanings and identities are negotiated on various levels. I argue that the levels of discourse described above can be identified very clearly. Essentially, the above circles can be reduced to three. On the most intimate level, the Shi‘i families who lovingly nurture the Hosay observance collectively preserve the most esoteric (bāṭin) and symbolic level of the ritual complex’s meaning. On the secondary level of Indo-Trinidadian ethnicity, Indians of other religious persuasions perpetuate the idea of Hosay as an Indian “cultural performance,” in Milton Singer’s term, divorced from its esoteric and sacred meanings.17 Finally, on the tertiary level of the nation-state, non-Indian Trinidadians (most significantly those of African descent) see the performance as a purely secular and exoteric (ẓāhir) Trinidadian event with close parallels to the island’s famous Carnival.18 What I want to suggest is that the terminology used for the event, as well as the social organization of the yards within which the tadjahs are built, exemplifies the Caribbean nature of the performance quite well, providing ample evidence for cultural creolization. Having posited this, however, it is equally important to underscore the remarkable continuities that one finds as a result of the odyssey from Iran to India to Trinidad. These continuities suggest to me a cultural strategy of what the linguist Derek Bickerton calls decreolization along a pidgin/creole continuum.
Decreolization, as I use the term here, allows Indo-Trinidadians to resist the totalizing effects of creolization by consciously identifying concepts in Afro-Trinidadian culture to parallel their own Indic-inspired ones as a method of tolerance and accommodation. Bickerton, following Langacker, speaks of linguistic change in the process of decreolization proceeding through a phase of reanalysis during which “no overt change in surface structure occurs but the underlying structure is re-interpreted.”19 I do not assume, however, that changes in the expressive culture of Indo-Trinidadians are unidirectional in favor of the dominant social class. For as Christine Jourdan warns, “if decreolization means a move in the direction of a standard, it does not mean … a loss of other varieties” because “not all changes in creoles are in the direction of the acrolect.”20 Rather, actors in public ritual drama have a repertoire of options from which to choose, depending on the situational context of their performances, which allows for a relatively free flow of ideas in both directions. My findings argue against a movement toward standardization defined by the dominant class, and they are supported by Kean Gibson’s recent study of Comfa religion and Creole language in Guyana.21 Gibson draws upon the work of Robert LePage and Andrée Tabouret-Keller and shares my interest in developing a multidimensional approach that acknowledges the coexistence of more than one linguistic or religious system operating within any given polyethnic society.22
By applying the above linguistic model of culture viewed through a ritualistic lens, I aim to move beyond the binaries of extreme retentionism and extreme creolization, two positions that have plagued Caribbean anthropological debates.23 In so doing, I am in agreement with Stuart Hall when he suggests that diasporic traditions retain strong links with their places of origin without harboring the illusion of any possibility of returning to the past. As he writes, “They are not and never will be unified in the old sense, because they are inevitably the products of several interlocking histories and cultures, belonging at the same time to several ‘homes’—and thus to no particular home.”24 Hall’s comment very clearly suggests that diasporic citizens are well aware that they may never go home to the motherland. It also suggests that they have the shifting option of expressing multiple allegiances in the negotiated form of various identities, be they religious, ethnic, national, or global. The imagined homeland abroad serves as a template for the bolstering of oscillating local identities, even while it remains largely unfathomable and incongruous to most.25
The Theoretical Scope of the Study and Its Relevance to the Field
As suggested in the above narrative, the observances have many levels of meaning that deserve close scholarly attention. Published works on the topic of muḥarram practices in Iran, India, and many other parts of the world are abundant, but no comprehensive monograph of the phenomenon in Trinidad currently exists. My aim is to fill this void with Hosay Trinidad. I trace the patterns of continuity and divergence mentioned above within the galaxy of muḥarram observances from their origins in the Middle East to the Caribbean via the Indian subcontinent as an example of transnational cultural production and flow. It was, after all, the military expeditions and expansions of Muslim conquerors from Central Asia that opened the door for the migration of the Shi‘ah from Persia to India in the fourteenth century. Moreover, it was the British colonial economy of indentured labor after the abolition of slavery in the nineteenth century that allowed for the rite’s diffusion from the Indian subcontinent to Trinidad. These very facts force me to consider unequal power relationships as motive causes of ritual change in the social, political, and economic arenas within which rituals are publicly enacted. Although I need to situate my Trinidadian research in this broader historical and geographic context, the main thrust of my work focuses on Trinidad. Comparative materials prove useful for drawing structural and symbolic parallels between the three sites as well as for discussing the local/global dialectic. I am most interested, however, in focusing my discussion on the ritual complex as performed in Trinidad in order to present the first full explication of this understudied and neglected phenomenon.
I want to convey to the reader a sense of