Little India: Diaspora, Time, and Ethnolinguistic Belonging in Hindu Mauritius / Edition 1

by Patrick Eisenlohr

Overview

Little India is a rich historical and ethnographic examination of a fascinating example of linguistic plurality on the island of Mauritius, where more than two-thirds of the population is of Indian ancestry. Patrick Eisenlohr's groundbreaking study focuses on the formation of diaspora as mediated through the cultural phenomenon of Indian ancestral languages—principally Hindi, which is used primarily in religious contexts. Eisenlohr emphasizes the variety of cultural practices that construct and transform boundaries in communities in diaspora and illustrates different modes of experiencing the temporal relationships between diaspora and homeland.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520248809
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	01/17/2007
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	341
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Patrick Eisenlohr is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Washington University.

Read an Excerpt

Little India

Diaspora, Time, and Ethnolinguistic Belonging in Hindu Mauritius

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By Patrick Eisenlohr

University of California Press

Copyright © 2006 The Regents of the University of California
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-24880-9

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Chapter One

Creole Island or Little India?

The Politics of Language and Diaspora

THE MODULARITY OF ETHNOLINGUISTIC NATIONALISM

Reflecting on the spread of nationalism in the colonial world, Partha Chatterjee, in The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories, asks whether the worldwide spread of the nation form has condemned postcolonial societies to follow "derivative" models of political organization and identification. Engaging with Benedict Anderson's thesis of the modularity of nationalism (Anderson 1991, 4, 87), Chatterjee suggests that postcolonial nationhood does indeed stand in a quasi-dialogic relationship with European models of nationality, yet it nevertheless exhibits irreducible difference from them, since it is crucially shaped by the conditions of the colonial encounter (Chatterjee 1993). Since ethnolinguistic nationalism is one of the central modalities of the Andersonian model (Anderson 1991, 71-77), one might also ask about the modularity of ethnonational community based on language in the postcolonial world, given the continuing relevance of language as an issue in conflicts surrounding postcolonial nationality.

South Asia has provided a rich field for investigation of this question. The wayBritish colonizers engaged in administrative practices and the production of knowledge about Indian languages resulted in a profound transformation of popular and official understandings of language and linguistic differentiation. The creation of standardized vernacular languages, as opposed to sacred (Sanskrit, Arabic) and nonvernacular imperial languages (Persian), possibly represents the most consequential result of this colonial preoccupation with Indian languages (Cohn 1985). This process went hand in hand with the growing impact of European understandings of linguistic ethnicity (Washbrook 1991), that is, the Herderian assumption that the sharing of vernacular linguistic practice constitutes a population as an ethnic group. Even though the understanding of the Indian language situation among colonial scholars as well as Indian intellectuals concerned with language was increasingly informed by the concept of linguistic ethnicity, the domestication of ethnolinguistic nationalism in India frequently led to results that were not intended by colonial scholars and administrators and did not conform to any of the presumably modular European conceptualizations of language and ethnicity. For example, the standardization of Hindustani as a pan-Indian vernacular "language of command" by John Gilchrist and other scholars affiliated with Fort William College in Calcutta provided the base for the Hindi-Urdu conflict in nineteenth-century north India. In the context of this conflict, some of the founding figures of modern Hindu nationalism created sanskritized standard Hindi as the national language of the Hindus (Brass 1974, Dalmia 1997, King 1994, Lelyveld 1993), even if the subsumption of other north Indian vernaculars as "dialects" of Hindi, suggested both by colonial scholars and Hindu nationalists, continued to be challenged by local elites (Burghart 1996, 362-408). In southern India, Tamil nationalists conceived a nationalized Tamil language worshipped as the goddess Tamiltay, represented as both mother and young maiden, in a mode of language-based nationalism better described as language devotionalism. Here language was experienced both through images of parenting, nourishing, and shared substance, and in eroticized forms of devotion to Tamiltay. The focus in this making of political community through language was on a bond of visceral "somatic devotion" between Tamil as a mother and a deity, and Tamil-speakers as her children and devotees, enacted in praise poetry as well as visual practice in iconography as part of a more widely shared ritual practice (Ramaswamy 1997). These scenarios have thrown doubt on the modularity of European models of the nationalization of language, where, according to Anderson, the standardization of vernacular languages occurred in the context of print capitalism, which in turn spurred a "lexicographic revolution" in Europe, a "golden age of vernacularizing lexicographers, grammarians, philologists and litterateurs" (Anderson 1991, 71; see also Hobsbawm 1990, 54-63). Accordingly, the creation of national print vernaculars was crucially informed by an understanding of standardized vernacular languages as key attributes of nationhood. Nevertheless, as the rise of Hindi and the deification of Tamil shows, the articulation between vernacular standardization and the imagination of ethnonational community took rather different turns in colonial and postcolonial South Asia.

The question of the modularity of ethnolinguistic nationalism presents itself still differently in the South Asian diaspora, especially in those overseas communities that were established through the export of labor from colonial India to other parts of the British empire in the context of the indenture system (Carter 1995, Tinker 1974). In these diasporic locations, the developing connection between language and ethnonational community can be understood as doubly refracted by colonialism. In British colonial Mauritius, Indian immigrants became part of a Frenchdominated plantation society where in the course of the twentieth century two distinct visions of ethnolinguistic community were articulated-Mauritius as a "Creole island," and Mauritius as "Little India," a diasporic location expressed through allegiance to Indian ancestral languages. In espousing very different characterizations of Mauritius as a society, these two ethnolinguistic projects related to European ethnolinguistic "modularity" in quite distinct ways. One important dimension of this tension is that in emphasizing either vernacular or "ancestral" linguistic practice these projects draw on different understandings of what it means for a group to have a linguistic identity.

DIASPORA AND THE INDETERMINACY OF ETHNOLINGUISTIC IDENTIFICATION

One way to account for the great variability of ethnolinguistic identification in both South Asia and its diaspora while at the same time critically questioning the notion of ethnolinguistic modularity is to understand such processes as informed by varying linguistic ideologies. Such ideologies may differ fundamentally, for example, in how they imagine ethnonational language and the modalities of linkage between a population and a language, in other words, what it means to "have" a language in a socially meaningful way.

Nevertheless, in the study of nationalism, the emergence of group identification based on language has frequently been portrayed as relatively predetermined. For example, Benedict Anderson's account of the rise of nationalism accords supreme importance to preexisting vernacular linguistic boundaries in Europe for determining the boundaries of national communities as these were shaped through the circulation of discourse through print commodities (Anderson 1991, 46-49). Accordingly, the plurality of newly imagined nations was due to the "fatality of human linguistic diversity" (Anderson 1991, 43). In Anderson's view, processes of vernacular linguistic standardization and unification at least partially preceded the rise of national consciousness, generating the nation in their articulation with print capitalism. Thus, following Anderson's model, the choice of, for example, French or German ethnolinguistic identification for the imagined nations of France and Germany was relatively self-evident. Modern print French and German provided the channels of communication through which these nations could be conceived, while a preexisting linguistic boundary between the two languages was responsible for constituting them as separate reading publics, and therefore separate nations. The role of modernized vernaculars in mediating mass communication is also central to Ernest Gellner's approach to nationalism. Here, the connection between language and national community lies in the functional necessity of modern standard vernacular languages for industrial civilization, for which nationalism provided the necessary ingredient of ideological integration (Gellner 1983). Gellner thus pays more attention to the functional role of language as a channel of mass communication in modern societies than to the multiple ways in which constructing nationhood also involved the imagination and ideologization of languages and its speakers.

In contrast, recent work in linguistic anthropology has insisted on the indeterminacy of ethnolinguistic identity, analyzing such processes of identification as shaped by linguistic ideologies (Silverstein 1979, Irvine and Gal 2000, Woolard and Schieffelin 1994). Consequently, it is important to realize that the nationalist imagination is not just confined to the construction of political communities whose relative linguistic homogeneity is presupposed. Contra Anderson, the national vision includes the imagination of not only the nation but frequently also languages and linguistic communities. As Jacqueline Urla's study of Basque nationalism shows (Urla 1988), the construction and imagination of Basque as a modern national language is a vital element in conceiving of a Basque nation especially because many people who identify themselves as Basque co-nationals have little knowledge of the Basque language. While openly admitting that a large part of the population of the territory claimed as belonging to the Basque nation does not speak the national language, nationalists may still strive to refashion and reinforce the imagined community by representing the national language as threatened and in need of support (Urla 1993). In this way, the national language becomes a crucial means of creating national communities, even if the knowledge and use of it are relatively restricted. As is also evident in Urla's discussion, such representations of language-based community and calls for national solidarity need not even be communicated in the national language.

Thus there is nothing self-evident about ethnolinguistic identities. Rather, they are shaped through linguistic ideologies against a range of possible visions. This is especially the case in a situation where alternative understandings of ethnolinguistic belonging are in conflict with each other, as in Mauritius. Categorizations of the country as a Creole island contrast with the building of communities based on Indian ancestral languages highlighting a continuing diasporic link to South Asia. As I will show, these competing notions of community differ not only in the linguistic varieties privileged but also in how they conceive of Mauritians in terms of cultural purity and hybridity, and therefore also how they locate Mauritians in historical time.

HINDUS AND THE NATION IN MAURITIUS

In the remainder of this chapter I describe the politics of language and diaspora among Hindu Mauritians and their implications for constructing a social memory of diasporic belonging. I focus on two principal modes of ethnolinguistic identification-the cultivation of Indian ancestral languages, above all Hindi, and the notion of Mauritius as a Creole island. Despite the fact that French-lexifier Mauritian Creole is known and used by the vast majority of Mauritians in everyday interaction, and despite the impact of a postcolonial campaign to promote a Mauritian nationalism based on the shared status of Mauritian Creole, ideas about ancestral languages play a crucial role for creating communities among Indo-Mauritians, in particular Hindus. I outline the social and historical context of these two modes of conceptualizing Mauritius ethnolinguistically, exploring their consequences for the shaping of the Hindu diaspora. In particular, I suggest that these two perspectives on the Hindu diaspora have very different implications for how to conceive of the relationship between Mauritians and India as the ancestral place for the majority of Mauritians. In thus delineating a Hindu diaspora, they also envision different types of relationships between Hindus and their ethnic others on the island by highlighting the former or the latter's relative importance in imagining a Mauritian nation.

Languages are frequently represented as inhabited by different temporalities. One example of how linguistic ideologies involve a regimenting of temporality (Inoue 2004; Irvine 2004; Woolard 2004) is the way sacred or classical languages are often experienced as literally belonging to another time, as compared to vernaculars (Haeri 2003). Such regimentations play a particularly important role in the creation of diasporas, which are communities defined through spatio-temporal remove from an assumed homeland. Ideologies of Mauritian Creole nationalism and of Hindi as the ancestral language of Hindus locate Mauritian Hindus in different temporal relationships to India. The privileging of ancestral language highlights the diasporic link and thereby minimizes the spatio-temporal remove between Mauritian Hindus and the world of their Indian ancestors, whereas Creole nationalism implies a temporal disjuncture between Mauritian Hindus and their Indian ancestors.

The island of Mauritius, lying in the Indian Ocean 800 kilometers east of Madagascar, had no human population when it was first visited by Portuguese navigators in the sixteenth century. The first settlement, under Dutch rule from 1638 to 1658 and again from 1664 to 1710, failed. Beginning in 1715, from their base on the neighboring island of Bourbon (now the French overseas département Réunion), the French extended their rule over Mauritius, which they named Isle de France. They turned the island into a flourishing trading entrepôt and set up the first sugar plantations, introducing a large slave population brought principally from Madagascar and mainland Africa. The beginnings of Indian migration also fall into this epoch, since a smaller part of the slave population was brought from the French possessions in India. Traders and craftspeople such as stonemasons also migrated to Mauritius from these possessions. In 1810, the British successfully conquered Mauritius from India, ending almost a century of French rule. Under British rule, sugarcane cultivation was greatly expanded and finally became the mainstay of the island's economy. After the abolition of slavery in the British empire in 1834, Indian indentured laborers began to replace the recently freed slaves on sugar plantations. In less than three decades Indian indentured laborers and their descendants constituted the majority of the island's population. At independence in 1968, Mauritius was still economically almost entirely dependent on the sugar industry. The economy, challenged by widespread poverty and unemployment and rapid population growth, was subject to unpredictable fluctuations determined by the weather and the price of sugar on the world market. Beginning in the 1970s, the Mauritian government established an Export Processing Zone to encourage the setup of garment assembly plants. This policy, supported by preferential trade agreements with the European Union and the United States, proved spectacularly successful in the 1980s, when garment factories sprang up all over the island. The standard of living for many Mauritians rose considerably, and the World Bank hailed Mauritius as an "economic miracle." The garment industry remains the most important sector of the island's economy, while the tourist industry, focused on a high-end clientele from Europe, has also grown rapidly since its beginnings in the 1970s. Nevertheless, the former pillar of the island's economy, the sugar industry, remains important, especially because it still employs approximately 7 percent of the workforce.

(Continues...)

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Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Note on Transliteration and Orthography

Introduction
1. Creole Island or Little India? The Politics of Language and Diaspora
2. An Indo-Mauritian World: “Ancestral Culture,” Hindus, and Their Others
3. Social Semiotics of Language: Shifting Registers, Narrative, and Performance
4. Colonial Education, Ethnolinguistic Identifications, and the Origins of Ancestral Languages
5. Performing Purity: Television and Ethnolinguistic Recognition
6. Calibrations of Displacement: Diasporization, Ancestral Language, and Temporality
Conclusion: Time, Technology, and Language

Notes
References
Index