Hosay Trinidad. Frank J. Korom
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of the local and the global with regard to the rite’s development in Trinidad.
Muḥarram in South Asia
Although many similarities exist between the Indic subcontinent and Iran in terms of performing muḥarram rituals, there are some great differences as well. A survey of Indian variations on the rite is the theme of Chapter 3, with special attention being paid to Banaras, where I first observed the event in the early 1980s.6 Perhaps the greatest and most significant difference in muḥarram rituals as observed in Shi‘i countries and in India lies in the use of the word ta‘zi̅yeh (Ur. ta‘zi̅yah). In Persian it is used to denote the ritual drama, or passion play, of Husayn’s death. The term has a different meaning in South Asia, however. There it is the name given to the model tombs, the focal point of the public processions that take place during the event, and it is this aspect of the observance that becomes the dominating material feature of the rite in Trinidad. It is thus to India that we must look closely to identify the most salient aspects and morphological features of the observance in Trinidad.
As in Trinidad, there is not an emphasis on staged performance during the month of Muharram in India. Rather, the reenactment of Husayn’s passion occurs as an unfolding social process within a larger symbolic space. The arena of performance, be it the house, the neighborhood, the village, or the city, becomes a microcosm of Karbala. Although Iran provides the underlying logic and symbolism for the event in the form of the Karbala paradigm, India provides the ritualistic precedent for the observance in Trinidad. Instead of staged drama, we find a greater emphasis on conveying the tragedy through the recitation of mars̲i̅yahs (martyr poems) and the singing of nauḥahs (dirges) at majālis (sing. majlis), social gatherings for ritual mourning. The development of mars̲i̅yah composition and recitation in India is obviously an innovative continuation of the rouz̤eh khvāni̅ tradition of Iran.7 Although the private majlis is the central focus of the muḥarram observance in India, as it is elsewhere in South Asia, the public processional rituals that occur on the streets are also important on the level of popular piety. There is a distinct dialectic between these private and public spheres of action that is evident in Trinidad as well. But whereas India continues the verbal narrative tradition of Iran, Trinidad has transformed language to rhythm, replacing verbal performances with a series of drum “hands” to convey the tragic story in a nonverbal, musical fashion. I wish to suggest that these two spheres allow for the emergence of multilayered understandings of the event by different interpretive communities. To make this point, I introduce the notion of “esoteric” and “exoteric” interpretations of the rite depending largely on the interpreter’s level of participatory intimacy with the rituals performed.
Again as in Trinidad, the ambulatory public observances and stationary private ones converge on the tenth of Muharram (‘āshūrā’) in India, the culminating day when participants embark on a symbolic pilgrimage by carrying their ta‘zi̅yahs in a huge procession to graveyards representing the plains of Karbala where Husayn was murdered. The ta‘zi̅yahs are then buried ideally during the noonday hour, the legendary time of Husayn’s last breath.8 In some parts of India, the ta‘zi̅yahs are immersed in rivers, oceans, or sacred tanks of water following the Hindu custom of deity immersion (visarjan) after a religious festival. The last point above indicates another important theme of my study: cultural accommodation. I wish to argue that the necessary process of a minority religious community adopting local customs has allowed the rituals to thrive creatively in each of the environments discussed. I refer to this process as “cultural creolization,” an appropriate alternative to the outdated and problematic concept of syncretism.9 Syncretism, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, suggests an “attempted union or reconciliation of diverse or opposite tenets or practices.”10 With its emphasis on an “attempted union,” the dictionary definition suggests an inconsistency in doctrine and practice. More appropriately, exploring creolization and the concomitant concept of “decreolization” as an alternative to syncretism allows me to emphasize human agency, the conscious decisions made by human actors, in my analysis of a rite’s historical transformation. Such work is sorely needed in ritual studies.
In their discussion of South Pacific spirit possession, Alan Howard and Jeannette Mageo follow Nicholas Thomas to argue that “parts of cultures often become metonyms for cultural continuity,” which results in “specific segments of reconfigured historical experience” becoming tradition.11 Hosay is one such metonym, an emblem of identity that is reworked constantly in different contexts. In stating this, however, I do not want to imply naive and syncretistic adaptations, for that would deny the essential role of human agency in the reinvention of tradition. For my purposes, the concept of creolization is more suitable to get at the “highly self-conscious and reflective” dimensions of cultural borrowing and subsequent reinvention to which Howard and Mageo refer.12
Hosay in Trinidad
The Trinidadian style of commemorating Husayn’s martyrdom seems very different from the Iranian and Indian forms at first glance, and much of the scarce literature on the rite makes ample mention of its purported creole nature.13 A closer look at the complex event reveals continuities with its older counterparts, constantly reminding us of its north Indian sources of origin. Hosay, as it is expressed today, is a direct by-product of earlier muḥarram observances that were brought to Trinidad by indentured East Indians who came to work on plantations as early as May 30, 1845. However, although the Indian origins of the rite can be observed clearly in Trinidad, there is no question that the ritual performance has gone through a fairly lengthy process of indigenization. The ethnographic portion of my text draws extensively on the words and opinions of the people involved in the rite.
While Trinidadian Shi‘i Muslims ideally show emotion for Husayn through public displays of drumming to signify the incidents pertaining to Husayn’s death and through the painstaking construction of the model tombs known as tadjahs, we also find that the observance becomes marked by gaiety and celebration for the revelers who participate in the public processions as audience members. The Trinidadian form of the rite becomes “carnivalized,” to use Mikhail Bakhtin’s term, so that it takes on aspects of observances occurring during periods of carnival in the Caribbean.14 At least that is how it seems to the outside observer. I argue that while this might be true to a certain extent, these carnival aspects are not new elements in the Trinidadian variant of the rite because similar occasions for festive behavior were already noticeable in India and even in Iran. This is not to say, however, that the nature of the observance’s outward appearance is uncontested in these countries. Indeed, the same sorts of ideological debate that emerge in Trinidad each year as Hosay approaches find expression in India and Iran as well.
The craftsmen and others associated with the forty-day preparation of Hosay do not condone the merrymaking on the streets during the public processions. Nonetheless, the historical transformation of muḥarram from a predominantly solemn observance to a public celebration is a distinctive process on the island. It marks the event as a characteristic form of Trinidadian performance. Through it, East Indians participate in Creole culture, but they also reassert their own Indian ethnic identity by performing a tradition that is perceived to have come to Trinidad from India in an unaltered state. The various uses and understandings of tradition as something unchanging and frozen in time are a vehicle for the ongoing negotiation of ethnicity in a relatively new and multicultural nation-state.
The theme of identity politics is addressed most forcefully in Chapter 6, where I argue that the Hosay phenomenon manifests multiple discourses about national culture, race, and ethnic identity on the island. The domains of these discourses can best be visualized as a series of concentric circles starting from the center and radiating outward like the proverbial ripples on a pond. In his study of the naven ritual among the Iatmul of New Guinea, Gregory Bateson mentions that they also see the world and all its inhabitants as ripples and waves on the surface of water: “It is said secretly that men, pigs, trees, grass—all the objects in the world—are