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Mobilizing India: Women, Music, and Migration between India and Trinidad. TEJASWTNI NIRANJANA. Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2006. 272 pp. (Paper US$21.95)
Mobilizing India is motivated by two central concerns. It represents Tejaswini Niranjana's encounter with Indo-Trinidadians and the ensuing questions about the construction of "Indian" identity that her own subcontinental subjectivity raised during visits to me West Indies. And it represents her desire to join the scholars who have sought to displace Western/metropolitan vantage points as the standard against which questions about modernity, nationalism, and gender in non-Western/nonmetropolitan contexts are measured and debated. In creating theoretical frameworks where comparative discussions among Global South countries can be undertaken, Niranjana's objective is to counter the conventional use of such concepts as gender and modernity and emphasize the different meanings they acquire in different contexts - for example, what it means to call oneself "Indian" in two Southern locations, India and Trinidad. Arguing that she is what she is "because of who the East Indian woman in Trinidad is" (p. 20, her italics), Niranjana discusses the ways female indentured laborers were defined, notably in terms of their gender and sexuality, by Indian nationalist agendas which constructed the modern Indian woman as the bourgeois antithesis of her independent, bold diasporic sister in the cane. Niranjana suggests a linkage between this history and the meaning of "Indian" represented in contemporary cultural practices such as calypso, and in Indo-Trinidadian women's subversive agency in chutney soca - the latter representing...