Music of Hindu Trinidad: Songs from the India Diaspora (Chicago Studies in Ethnomusicology)

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About Music Of Hindu Trinidad: Songs From The India

Product Description Like many other small towns in Trinidad, Felicity is populated almost entirely by East Indians. In their Caribbean exile, the residents of Felicity have created and recreated the music of their Hindu ancestors. Music of Hindu Trinidad is a fascinating account of the history and cultural significance of Hindu music that explores its symbolic, aesthetic, and psychological aspects while asking the larger question of how this music has contributed to the formation of identity in the midst of their great diaspora. Myers details the musical repertory of Felicity, which is based largely on north Indian genres including the traditional Bhojpuri folk songs and drumming styles brought by the first indentured laborers in 1845. In her engaging exploration of the fate of Indian classical music and new popular styles such as Hindi calypso, soca, and chutney, she even finds herself at the ancestral home of Trinidadian V. S. Naipaul in India. Copiously illustrated and accompanied by a compact disk, Music of Hindu Trinidad is a model ethnographic study. From Library Journal An ethnomusicological study with heart, this loving history and portrait of the people and musical culture of the town of Felicity, an East Indian enclave in Trinidad, is scholarly, personal, packed with information about music that 19th-century North Indians brought to the promised sugarcane land of the British West Indies, and affirmative of the process of change. Myers (coauthor of Indian Games and Dances with Native Songs, Univ. of Nebraska, 1994) sojourns in both Felicity and India and documents Felicity's "vitality of traditions in flux." To perform this music, Hindus in English-speaking Trinidad must sing in foreign languages and so must learn wedding songs, religious songs, love songs, etc., by rote, which Myers describes not as anti-intellectual but as "the bedrock of culture." A serious and, indeed, felicitous study; recommended for large music collections.?Bonnie Jo Dopp, Univ. of Maryland Lib., Silver Spring Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.