It was my and my mother’s first ever trip to India. To my surprise, after our visit my feelings toward India were very different from what I thought they would be. I did not go to India to fortify some emotional bond with my “Motherland”. In fact, I expected this trip to finalise the sense of distance I felt from contemporary India – a sense developed from my experience with Indians in Toronto (where I grew up), in the United Kingdom, and the Indian nationals resident in Jamaica and Trinidad. In these places, I had met what we in Trinidad would simply call “Indians”, but are more properly referred to as South Asians, not only from the many linguistic, religious and regional groups of India itself, like the Punjabis, the Sindhis, Goans, Tamils, Malayalees, and Kannada speakers, but also from Fiji, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Tanzania, Kenya, South Africa, Mauritius, and other places of the Indian Diaspora. To the people whom I met from all these groups, Trinidad Indian culture was alien and unfamiliar. Our food – dhalpourie, saheena, kuchela, pholourie, kurma -- many of our names (like “Meighoo”), and other things that Trinidadians think “Indian” might as well have been Venezuelan as far as these others were concerned. Similarly, to me, their food, customs, languages, etc. were alien and unfamiliar. I had to learn about India and things Indian, and I eventually did.

This paper appraises Shamshu Deen’s account of his and his wife’s family in Trinidad who left their ‘homeland’ India in 1845. It accounts the ‘pull and push’ factors of sociological, historical, economic and other reasons of the indentures. It highlights author’s description of community feeling among his family. We can find the presence of “imagined communities” (Benedict Anderson, 1982) like community formation among Muslims and non-Muslims there. This article appreciates writer’s strenuous toil to compose the book through different researches - oral researches, telecommunication research, discursive research and other researches.

One of the long-held myths about Indian women immigrants in Trinidad and Tobago is that they migrated with their families under the power; authority and control of their male relatives and were docile and tractable. These views ignore the historical documentation on the 'Indian Women Problem' which confronted the colonial office as far back as 1845 when Indian indentureship to Trinidad began. Contemporary research in women's history has revealed that a large proportion of Indian women did make a conscious decision to seek a new life elsewhere. They came as workers and not as dependents. However, the planters saw women as 'unproductive' labour and policies facilitated their exploitation as cheap labour In addition the hierarchical social structure of the Brahminic Sanskritic tradition brought about a conflation of interests between migrant Indian men and the colonial capital. Indian women in the colonies did not easily or willingly submit to these designs

One of the long-held myths about Indian women immigrants in Trinidad and Tobago is that they migrated with their families under the power, authority and control of their male relatives and were docile and tractable. These views ignore the historical documentation on the'Indian Women Problem'which confronted the colonial office as far back as 1845 when Indian indentureship to Trinidad began. Contemporary research in women's history has revealed that a large proportion of Indian women did make a conscious decision to seek a ...