East Indian Music in the West Indies: Tan-Singing, Chutney, and the Making of Indo-Caribbean Culture

East Indian Music in the West Indies: Tan-Singing, Chutney, and the Making of Indo-Caribbean Culture. By PETER MANUEL. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000. 252 pp., with a Compact Disc. $89.50 (cloth); $29.95 (paper).

Given the dearth of published material on Indo-Caribbean traditional and neotraditional music (due in part to the misperception that these diasporic art forms are marginal rather than archetypical), the body of research in this book by ethnomusicologist Peter Manuel is a welcome contribution to the field. The book describes two East Indian musical genres, tan-singing (local-classical music) and chutney, as they evolved in Trinidad, Guyana, and Suriname after the influx of indentured workers from the Bhojpuri-speaking region of North India from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries. Written primarily for an academic readership, the study includes only one technical chapter aimed at ethnomusicologists (Chapter 5: "Style and Subgenre in Tan-Singing"). In addition to the introduction and conclusion, the other four chapters focus on the development of local-classical music; its efflorescence and decline beginning in the 1960s; the aesthetics of tan-singing; and the chutney phenomenon.

Despite their fascinating beauty and expressive role in cultural change, tan-- singing and chutney have hardly been mentioned in the books on Indo-Caribbean culture and history written in the last decade. To overcome this deficiency, in 1993 Manuel began to interview...