In this paper, I situate music as a way of remembering the past and bringing it to bear on the present. Jacques Attali suggests that music reflects and makes audible the "signs that make up society" (Attali 2012), while Sarah Pink observes that hearing is "part of how we understand our past, how we engage with our present, and how we imagine our futures. In this regard, I analyze select aspects of Indian Trinidadian tassa drumming to highlight ways that Indian Trinidadians recall and transform the traumatic legacy of indentureship through musical performance.
The memory of indentureship forms a vital component of contemporary Indian Caribbean identity. To fill the labor gap opened by emancipation of enslaved Africans, Indians first arrived in the Caribbean as contract laborers in the 1830s. Trinidad received nearly 150,000 men, women, and children during the indentureship period (1845-1917), the majority remaining in the colony rather than return to India once their contracts had expired. Working conditions were harsh and pay was meager, but many found hope in the prospects of a new life in Trinidad rather than face certain hardships in an India depleted by drought and British colonization. Today, about half the 1.3 million people of Trinidad & Tobago identify as Indian.
Tassa drumming is the local variant of the North Indian dhol-tasha tradition. While maintaining important links with dhol-tasha forebears, tassa has taken a decidedly Caribbean trajectory in its development. In my analysis, I focus on two specific aspects of tassa drumming. First, I describe the musical narrative inherent in the progression of "hands" (distinct composite rhythms) played by the tassa ensemble for Hindu weddings and other celebratory events. Second, I show how this narrative is adapted for formal tassa competitions where the story of Indian arrival, integration, and emergence is made apparent in staged spectacles featuring actors, dancers, props, and other theatrical devices. Such performances invariably reiterate an Indocentric nationalist narrative, which has gradually emerged to commemorate Indian heritage while simultaneously mark Indian culture as a vital component of Trinidadian multiculturalism (Brereton 2007).
I conclude by suggesting that musical performance emerges as a way of remembering, of embodying the past to make sense of the present and look ahead to the future. It is through such a process that tassa remains relevant for drummers, dancers, and listeners today. As tassa emerges out of the slow explosion of the plantation, it benefits from the newness of creolization and the creativity inherent in the diasporic experience, yet is still bound by the compartmentalization of "culture" in a multicultural society. In this way, musical instruments, timbres, forms, and performance contexts mark tassa as "Indian" while these very same elements, by virtue of their repetition and performance in diaspora, mark the Caribbean as home.
