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Kala Pani

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What is Kala Pani?

''काला पानी'' (Kala pani) translates literally as 'black water'. A hindi phrase, it refers to the taboo practice of crossing the seas and leaving India, prohibited in the Manusmriti (The Laws of Manu), a prominent legal, religious and moral Hindu text. Kala Pani was specifically banned as it was 'associated with contamination and cultural defilement' [Mehta], usually meaning a breakdown in the caste system present in Indian society throughout history. 

Kala Pani and Transoceanic crossings

Today, the term Kala Pani is used to refer specifically to the crossings made by indentured labourers originating in India, with many ending up in the Carribean. As described in Ramabai Espinet's The Swinging Bridge, those considered as occupying a lower rung in the caste (in this example, widows, or rands) were often the people who undertook the Kala Pani and became indentured labourers. As a result, there are many communities of descendants of these Indian diasporas, of which Espinet is a member, hailing from an Indo-Trinidadian family.


Indentured Indians Arriving in Natal Harbour | KALA PANI The beginning of an indentured labourer's journey across the Kala Pani




Sources used:

  • 'The Swinging Bridge', Ramabai Espinet, 2003.
  • 'Indianités Francophones: Kala Pani Narratives', Brinda J. Mehta, 2010.
  • 'Across the Kala Pani', Michael Pearson, Himal Southasian, 2010.

Ramabai Espinet and The Swinging Bridge

Ramabai Espinet is an Indo-Carribbean-Canadian writer born in the 1940s in San Fernando, which is Trinidads and Tobogos' second largest city. Her ancestors arrived from India on the island of Trinidad, alongside thousands of others who were brought to Trinidad as indentured servants. Ramabai grew up on the island before moving northward, as in the 60s her family immigrated to Canada. Ramabai has lived in both Canada and the Caribbean since she first immigrated in the 60s. Ramabai always dreamed of becoming a writer, and her poetic writing highlights the idea of the Asian diaspora with the struggles and lifestyles of the modern Indo-Caribbean woman (Huntington, Watlington, & Haverstock, 2005).

https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/281587.Ramabai_Espinet
In 2003, Espinet released "The Swinging Bridge," her debut book. According to the Caribbean author George Lamming, Ramabai Espinet has "put the art of memory into the service of an Asian Diaspora whose history from India to the Caribbean traces the secrets and calamities of an Indian family who, in their encounter with other ethnicities, experienced terrible tragedies." (Espinet, 2004).

"The Swinging Bridge" is a moving story of race and displacement, a story that brings us through nineteenth-century India, with its cast-out Brahmin widows, to the cane fields of Trinidad, where impoverished Indians become indentured labourers, to the optimism of the twentieth century, when the island sheds its colonial past and reimagines itself as a new homeland for many cultures. But by the 1960s, racial politics and the promise of economic security draw Mona’s family to North America, where they discover a new continent with old problems (Tortontomu, 2017).

Sources used:

  • University of Minnesota. (2005). Ramabai Espinet [Brochure]. Minnesota: Author.

  • Espinet, R. (2004). The Swinging Bridge. Toronto: Harper Perennial.

  • Ramabai Espinet. (2017). Retrieved April 13, 2023, from https://library.torontomu.ca/asianheritage/authors/espinet/

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