Multidirectional and archipelagic memory of Partition and indenture in Ismith Khan’s The Jumbie Bird

Abstract

Published in 1960 on the eve of Trinidad’s independence in 1962, Ismith Khan’s novel The Jumbie Bird deals with the birthing of Indo-Caribbean anti-colonial political consciousness, focusing on the repatriation of Indian indentured labourers to India. Contractually due at the end of indenture, repatriation remained largely unfulfilled when indenture ended in 1917. The issue resurfaced following India’s independence, only to be viewed by the Indian nation as the “East Indian problem” that had to be got rid of.

The novel’s originality lies in its focus on a Muslim Pathan family and its understudied shift to India’s independence and shattering Partition, to explore the construction of a hybrid Indo-Caribbean identity underpinned by an Indianness no longer rooted in the subcontinent but forged in the Caribbean.

By examining how the novel includes the Partition while distancing itself from it, I argue that the memory of (post-)indenture is linked to that of the Partition in a multidirectional but also archipelagic way. I draw on the epistemic modality of “archipelagic memory” (Kabir and Raimondi 2024) which conceives islands, archipelagos but also enclaves, coastlines, hence spaces like the Indian subcontinent, as porous and transformed through their often-discontinuous memory interconnection to other spaces, to demonstrate that the Partition and Indian indenture in the Caribbean are archipelagically networked by hidden, contradictory, but persistent memory and cultural fragments.