NCIC
Issue 2
November 2012
A Panel Discussion on East Indian women, their roles in modern Trinidadian Society and paving the way for young girls and women
On July 7th 2012, the NCIC Youth Arm
hosted its first Panel Discussion titled,
“Hamaari Kahani - The Journey of East
Indian Women through Trinidadian Society.”
The aim of the panel was to bring together diverse women to speak about
their experiences in Trinidad through the
lens of race and gender and was meant
to be interactive; facilitating an exchange
and dialogue between the members of
the audience and members of the panel in
a telling of the collective - but diverse stories of Indo-Trinidadian women.
when an Indo-Trinidadian woman sits in
the office of Prime Minister, both Valini
Pundit and Sharda Patasar felt that the
“glass ceilings” of race and gender discrimination have largely been “shattered”
by prior generations of Indo-Trinidadian
women. Others, however, continued to feel
the sting of raced and gendered prejudices coming from both within and outside
the ‘Indo-Trinidadian community.’
Ria
Ramnarine, for example, lamented a lack
of state and community patronage for her
sport, and noted the ways popular stereotypes have rendered boxing incompatible
with notions of appropriate Indian womanhood. Indeed, a lively and heated discussion in the question period centered on
Indo-Trinidadian women and girls’ negotiations of ‘cultural’ and ‘national’ identity.
Can and should an Indo-Trinidadian
woman celebrate Shivratri and then Carnival the next day? Are ‘Indo-Trinidadian’
and ‘Trinidadian’ separate and irreconcilable, or in fact compatible and coterminous subject positions? While from her
vantage point as a Hindu Indo-Trinidadian
woman in living in North-West Trinidad,
Charmaine Bissessar remarked that she
often felt herself at “loggerheads” in her
simultaneous living out of both ‘religious’
and nationalised, ‘creolised’ traditions; she
and other panelists argued for the importance of traversing within and across these
spaces and their cultural inheritances as
women.
The five panelists were Valini Pundit, Clinical Psychologist, Yoga Instructor and Political Activist with the Congress of the
People; Dr. Gabrielle Hosein, Lecturer at
the Institute in Gender and Development
Studies at the University of the West Indies and Feminist Activist; Sharda Patasar,
Musician trained in Classical Hindustani
Music and Academic whose Ph.D. research
focuses on East Indian Music and Identity
formations in Trinidad; Dr. Charmaine
Bissessar, who earned her doctorate in
Organisational Management and Leadership from the University of Phoenix and
currently is an Academic Development
Coach at the Hugh Wooding Law School
and Author of a collection of short stories,
“Grains of Sand”; and Ria Ramnarine, a
prize-winning Boxer, Kickboxer, a Karate
Sensei and Trinidad and Tobago's first
female World Boxing Champion and first
female Kick-Boxer to win an International Drawing on the inspiration of IndoTrinidadian foremothers who through resilkickboxing title.
ience and independence crafted meaningAs each panelist presented her contribu- ful lives and homes for themselves and
tion, it was clear that their experiences as their families in the Caribbean, Dr. GabriIndo-Trinidadian women varied
depending on a number of circumstances, including religious upbringing, geographic location and
class position, truly bringing together a diverse range of stories.
Making plain the impossibility of
positing a singular ‘IndoTrinidadian’ identity, Panelists expressed varying views on the continued salience of ‘race’ and
‘ethnicity’ in their lives, careers and
in national society as a whole.
Speaking from their own perspectives and at a historical juncture
elle Hosein urges today’s generation of
Indo-Trinidadian women and girls not to
“be afraid of working it out for yourselves
- you have a right to have your own relationship with tradition, family, community,
self, identity and everything as you decide.”
A strain of rebelliousness in working out
those relationships was a theme that ran
throughout the discussion: the strong willed
actions of women who came to Trinidad
often times as single labourers forced to
negotiate their place around both Indian
and Trinidadian creolised patriarchies; the
quiet rebellion of Sharda Patasar in deciding to not adhere to certain traditions
while still finding the center of her identity
within the Vedantic tradition of Hinduism;
or Ria Ramnarine’s explicit rebellion
against both her family and socially constructed ideas of Indian womanhood
through her engagement with boxing,
kickboxing and karate. Significantly, this
strain of rebelliousness did n ot mean an
abandoning of traditions. For Valini Pundit
and Sharda Patasar their sense of identity
comes from a rootedness in strong Hindu
upbringings. Where Valini was guided by
the ideas of womanhood presented to her
through Hinduism, Sharda found a sense
of universality and a deeper understanding of self in the Vedantic philosophies.
Religion was also discussed as a fundamental axis through which negotiation took
place. Dr. Gabrielle Hosein, for example,
spoke about the ways she sees Muslim
women having to negotiate their place in
the world today - recalling her gentle,
loving, and educated, academically inclined, small business-owning great grandmother. With her orhni tucked into
her waist, the multiplicity of her selfdefinition one hundred years ago
highlights the fluidity of ways Muslim
women can choose to define themselves even today.
The NCIC Youth Arm thanks the esteemed Panelists for sharing their
varied and valuable insights and
looks forward to hosting future
thought-provoking Panel Discussions
on topics of relevance to youth and
the national community in the months
to come.
Panelists and Moderator in discussion
4
By Aneela Bhagwat