Tradition · Indo-Caribbean music genre · Trinidad and Tobago
Chutney music
The music the Indian Caribbean made out of what it had: Bhojpuri folk song — the women's wedding repertoire in particular, sung at the matikor — set to dholak and dhantal, and then pushed through calypso and soca rhythms and amplified. It emerged publicly in Trinidad and Guyana in the 1960s and 1970s and became a mass genre with Sundar Popo's “Nana and Nani” in 1970. The lyrics move between Bhojpuri, Hindi and English, often in one line.
- Function
- Arts & performance
- Confidence
- Not assessed
- Location
- 10.660, -61.510
Worth knowing
Its core repertoire came from songs sung by women at pre-wedding ceremonies that men were excluded from, so a private and largely female tradition became the public dance music of two countries.
Connections (1)
- In the same set asSuriname
The two surviving halves of one emigration. Trinidad and Guyana produced chutney — Bhojpuri wedding song pushed through Caribbean rhythm into a mass genre — while Suriname, next door on the South American mainland and Dutch rather than British, produced Sarnami as a full spoken language and its own baithak gana music. The recruits came from the same districts and often the same depots; the difference in what they made is largely the difference between an English and a Dutch colonial frame around them.
Sources
Wikipedia, “Chutney music”. Peter Manuel, East Indian Music in the West Indies (2000); Tejaswini Niranjana, Mobilizing India (2006).
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