Nagara: Indo-Caribbean Sexualities, Erotic Autonomy, and Dance
Image: Geetika Dance Company Archives
Introduction
“Mainstream” Toronto culture is indebted to immigrant Caribbean communities and cultural producers. Cultural expressions such as creole and patois (which often become subsumed under the myth of “Toronto slang”), Carnival, soca and dancehall music, and Caribbean dance cultures have found residencies in many spaces of everyday Toronto life. Often represented as joyous, celebratory, and “fun”, non-Caribbean folk often do not recognize how these cultural acts are more than a site of “trendy” 6ix culture, but a political force, history, ancestral knowledge, and a pedagogy for Caribbean communities. Here, music and dance have never operated as apolitical but rather, as important archives of knowing that continue to teach us important lessons about survival, protest, resistance, and revolution. Rarely recognized in the space of non-Caribbean Toronto, Caribbeanness and particularly dance allow its subjects to use the body, and movement to engage in critical acts of push back and free up that tell powerful stories of social justice that non-Caribbean appropriations of Caribbean sound dance on Instagram and Tik Tok cannot speak, articulate, or explain. In particular, Caribbean culture has shown us what it means to reclaim one’s body, gender, and sexuality from forces that would seek to regulate, control, and police it.
In the Caribbean, colonial forces shaped ideologies of “acceptable” sexualities as those that adhered to rules of “respectability. Framing heterosexuality as absolute law, those who defied its tyrannical legislation became positioned as outsider, cleared for ridicule. Despite being situated in times of “postcolonialism” (although are they really?), these rules continue, and are exacerbated in spaces like Toronto where Caribbean communities have now come into contact with other survivors of colonized regions, particularly in our interactions and organizing relationships with South Asian communities.
When South Asian powers position, Indo-Caribbeans as immoral, or too sexy, or unruly (and vice-versa), we see the continuities and legacies of white supremacy at play - a system that sought to fragment our communities and turn them against each other using the logics they developed around what is and is not “normal” and “proper”. This piece specifically centers dance because of its central importance to South Asian and Indo-Caribbean initiatives for decolonization and resilience. Locating our conversation to Toronto communities, we seek to build solidarities across “Brown” communities. We ask our readers to think about how in everyday spaces, like the dance floor, sexual politics, “authenticity”, and surveillance can be dismantled, especially in South Asian and Indo-Caribbean communities.
Why is understanding histories and contemporary Indo-Caribbean dance and sexualities important to South Asian communities? Our histories do not exist in isolation or a monolith. Rather, our histories constantly collide and cross over into each other, despite “modern” nationalist logic that seek to position us within areas and identities that cannot be in conversation with each other. During the era of BLM and a global pandemic, it is now more pertinent than ever that South Asians and Indo-Caribbeans engage with the intimacies of each others lives, for any type of oppositional politics is actually antithetical to the political action needed in this time.
Image: Geetika Dance Company Archives
Indo-Caribbean Dance as Sexual Agency
The sexual prowess embedded in Indo-Caribbean dance that often makes South Asian mothers clutch their pearls has become intrinsic to Indo-Caribbean womens cultural spaces. Ideas and knowledge about our sexuality move through distinct Indo-Caribbean dance forms like Nagara (Indo-Caribbean theatrical dance that historically has been performed by men but is now mostly done by women to tassa drumming) and Chutney dance (Indo-Caribbean popular music genre) that arrived to the Caribbean through systems of indentured servitude. Developed through intertwining histories and dialogues with Afro-Caribbean dance forms like “wining”, Nagara dance in particular over the last one hundred years has been re-interpreted by Indo-Caribbean women and reconfigured with erotic agency, pushing back against colonial mentalities about what it meant to be a “respectable” woman.
Lessons about sex and sexuality moved through dances of Nagara, meant to teach young adolescents about sexual acts, confidence, and having authority over one’s body. For example, we know that historically in Nagara, men would often tie a cloth around their waist while dancing to refer to their phallic power. Yet, in contemporary times, Indo-Caribbean women have also remixed these dance gestures to speak to their own erotic power and to push back against the marginalization of their womanhood. Thus, for Indo-Caribbeans, dance is community-based learning and historical knowledge. Yet, throughout history, the sexual positivity of Indo-Caribbean dance has often been invalidated as legitimate knowledge and systems of misogyny have worked to erase the “slackness” or erotic looseness such acts carried.
Between 1973-1976, the government of India established “Cultural Centres” in Guyana, Suriname and Trinidad for the purposes of teaching specifically North Indian styles of music and dance. The Indian government, by intent or none, used this as a way to “tame” and police” Indo-Caribbeans and lay the foundations of creative loyalties to North Indian culture, despite Indo-Caribbeans tracing multiple ancestral lineages to Tamil, South Indian, Bengali and Sri Lankan origins,in addition to North India. Kathak and Odissi dance, as well as Hindustani music, were introduced as classical styles to the region, which simultaneously worked to erase the “impurity” of local forms like Nagara. While the Cultural centres were open to all races, the teachers that came from India were met with surprise at the talent that Caribbean peoples had within the arts and began encouraging them to return back to “the motherland” to train professionally on scholarships. However, this did little to change perceptions about Indo-Caribbean culture and sexuality.
As Indo-Caribbean communities migrated to sites of the Global North, particularly in large masses in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, misrepresentations of Indo-Caribbean sexualities were also further exacerbated through these movements and specifically, in our interactions with other South Asian diasporas.
Image: Geetika Dance Company Archives
Co-founder of Geetika Dance Company, Geeta Leo, is one of the most celebrated classical and chutney dancers that has continued teaching Nagara outside of the Caribbean. However, despite her organizational efforts, intolerant attitudes toward Indo-Caribbean dance and sexuality run rampant in our community spaces. For instance, in June of 2019, her company was invited to perform an “interactive dance lecture” in Thunder Bay for a South Asian festival, specifically to teach the audience how to dance to what they called “traditional Indian drum beats”.
When asked to submit the music for performance, Geetika Dance Co. had to explain the significance of tassa to the organizers, which Premika Leo (co-founder of GDC), identified as “Caribbean-based wedding or celebratory drums”.
Upon hearing the word “Caribbean,” the South Asian organizers rejected the music saying, “We can’t have Black people music, it’s too vulgar”. They were clearly not aware that Premika and Geeta were both Caribbean womxn, and therefore, the dance company would be performing with both Black and Brown dancers, all of Caribbean descent, using traditional drumming music. Premika then re-sent the exact same music, renamed “Indian wedding drums” with no qualms from the organizers.
The day of the lecture, Premika presented in Creolese (Guyanese Creole) and used a ‘plantation posture” (a hunched posture field workers would assume when at rest) to resist the South Asian purity politics enforced on her. For 20 minutes, the audience broke out into a collective dance space to Tassa music, which was deemed “too Black” and “vulgar” for the people of Thunder Bay. Needless to say, the organization was horrified with this, despite positive feedback from festival-goers.
We bring up one such example not to point fingers at South Asians but to speak to the continued work we need to do against anti-Blackness, classisms, misogyny, and other gendered and sexual struggles. As we speak to South Asians and work to build coalition among us, we must address the hypersexualization of racialized women’s sexualities that move beyond Caribbean communities but across multiple spaces and geographies that colonialism touched. For such mindsets that adhere to a politics of respectability only work to block women from access to their autonomy and bodies. Without the willingness to unlearn, we might forget that colonial mentality (that has become so normalized and indoctrinated in our communities), despite what nationalists tell us, will not save or liberate us. As Audre Lorde famously said, the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. Working through popular culture and dance is just one way Indo-Caribbean feminists have worked, both historically and in contemporary times, to challenge structures of power that seek to render us inferior privileged figures. This helps us to think about beyond the art form itself, dance is more than about dance. It is about power, sexuality, selfhood, community, and potential for what freedom could feel like. Dance teaches Indo-Caribbean stories of what a world could look like without regulation, surveillance, and control.
Ryan Persadie
Premika Leo
