2 - Under the orhni: intimacy and near-invisibility among older Indo-Trinidadian queer men

Summary

Introduction: queer erasure on the (post)colonial plantation

Indo- Caribbean people are not culturally ‘Indian’ but represent a distinct diasporic culture that combines traditional Indian cultures with modern African- Caribbean ones (Sampath, 1993, Raghunandan, 2012). The hyphenated identity ‘Indo- Caribbean’ establishes the existence of Indianness that is rooted in the Caribbean space, its legacies of indentured labour and slavery, and its past and contemporary socio- economic and cultural relations. The figures of Indian masculinity and femininity, as well as Indo- Caribbean masculinity and femininity, were constructed in different ways over time and space, and from different perspectives, to fit various narratives of citizenship and belonging. Old photographs and postcards from the days of Indian indenture on Caribbean sugarcane plantations, themselves symbols of antiquity and empire, were invested in representing the exotic and ‘othered’ coolies (Bahadur, 2015). The women were depicted with ornate jewellery, in either traditional saris or Western dresses, their heads covered with a head scarf, the orhni, a symbol of Indian femininity; young women's purity, married women's modesty, and older women's piety are represented by the veil covering the head and sometimes the face. Men too wore head- coverings, such as the turban or pagri. Although these garments are today mainly used during ceremony and rituals, the orhni symbolises tradition, privacy, secrecy and mystery, tropes that are also associated with Indian gender and sexuality, which Tejaswini Niranjana contends is a deliberate creation of nationalist moralities, with ‘appropriate “Indian” modes of sociosexual behaviour, the parameters for the state's regulation of reproduction as well as sexuality, and the delineation of the virtues that would ensure for Indian women citizenship in the future nation’ (2011: 122). Sexual morality was used to anchor ‘respectable’ ethnic, religious, class and national identities through deliberately erasing narratives of non- conformity (Wahab, 2012; Persadie, 2020). Thus, queer erasure results from modern colonial society's political (legal), social and economic structures.

While African- Caribbean queer men and men- who- have- sex- with- men are hyper- visible, Indo- Caribbean men are comparably absent from discourses, studies and representations of Caribbean queerness. Women are even less visible. African- Caribbean queer scholar, poet and performance artist Rosamond King, terms this ‘near- invisibility’, whereby queer women are ‘implicitly acknowledged while explicitly denied’ (2014, 15).