Revisiting Return in Selvon’s Writing

A turn to origins is often viewed as nostalgia, however, diasporic returns from the Caribbean to India have always carried heightened social and political resonances. Take for example Trinidad and Tobago Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar’s state visit to India in 2012, which was widely reported in Indian media as a homecoming but controversially covered in the Caribbean due to her perceived deference to the President of India. As Munasinghe suggests, “excessive identification with India” is often seen as evidence of Indo-Caribbean communalism, or an “ambivalent national subjectivity” towards Trinidad (67–68). Interest in return raises suspicions of dual loyalty, which can be traced directly to the indentureship contract. Indentureship brought Asian labourers to the Caribbean; their indenture contracts promised a return voyage back to India once the terms of labour had been fulfilled. “They had a home. It was far away, but they hadn’t forgotten” (Selvon “An Island”, 211), even though most indentured labourers in the Caribbean did not return.

Diasporic return is a pivotal moment that Samuel Selvon revisits in his writing. At various points in his fiction and nonfiction, Selvon traces a web between: return migration from Trinidad to India; the opening up of other migration opportunities; the promise of West Indian federation and Trinbagonian Independence; the collapse of the British Empire; and the birth of an independent Indian state. This intricate literary return to the political and social spaces that shape the mid-twentieth century is a crucial juncture for Selvon’s reflections on the meaning and directions of home, as well as fractures of belonging. I follow his thoughts on return over decades primarily through his novel, A Brighter Sun (1952); “The West Indian Patchwork” an essay written for the Royal Geographical Society (1955a); his novel An Island is a World (1955b); his play “Home Sweet India” (produced for the BBC in 1970); and his address “Three into One Can’t Go – East Indian, Trinidadian, Westindian” at the seminal East Indians in the Caribbean Conference (held at the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine Campus in 1979). I suggest that in these texts, Selvon reinscribes diasporic return and its significance as a marker of the shifting orientations of Indo-Caribbean place, belonging and identity.

Selvon has been celebrated as a writer that quintessentially portrays what it means to be a Caribbean person. C.L.R. James cautioned against any reductive ethnic interpretations of Selvon’s writing, as he was a writer “equally at home with the Indian and the African population of the West Indies.” While diaspora by its very nature is not nationally bounded, it does risk tethering identity to a singular ancestral origin, despite layers of plurality in the Caribbean. In addition to African and Indian (and Chinese, Syrian, Lebanese, Portuguese, and European) presences, the region retains an Indigenous presence. Selvon’s (reluctant) compatriot, V.S. Naipaul, opens the foreword to The Loss of El Dorado (a colonial history of Trinidad), by noting the diasporic journey of his ancestors from India to Chaguanas, a town named after “a people called Chaguanes,” as he discovers in nearly forgotten Spanish archives (13). Trinidad (like another El Dorado–Guyana) is a landscape haunted by multiple histories and relations to land, spirits, and ancestors, as well as to cycles of catastrophe and delayed freedom. For Lily Cho, the dislocations and dispossessions which comprise Asian indentured diasporas in the Americas must be understood in the wake of “black Atlantic formations” that preceded indentureship (192). This is necessary because the Black Atlantic has profoundly impacted indentured diasporic identity in two ways, in relation to an understanding of the histories of rupture shaped by ocean crossings, and a disruption of an imagined homogeneity. Wilson Harris (1970) expands our understanding by asserting entwined Indigenous, African, and Asian survival as an inherited New World Caribbean space that informs the diasporic condition. Poet Faizal Deen, in his personal experience of this “supersyncretic” diaspora ponders what it means to be (Indo-) Caribbean, not separate and apart, but marked by ruptures and returns, asking: “Why would anyone want to return to a place of dispossession?” and “what does it mean then to leave but to never leave?” (15). Deen’s questions are at the heart of how we might think of ourselves as descendants of indentured labour routed through (impossible) returns. I am interested in how Selvon understands diaspora in flux through his re-situating of diasporic memory via unfinished histories, recalled through a small but significant last return from Trinidad to India, in the mid-twentieth century. His narration of this moment and milieu of return offers us a reckoning with the legacies of indentureship in the Caribbean that complicate a linear diasporic/ post-diasporic identity.

Selvon is best known for his novels that speak, in nation language, to conditions of migration and exile (the Moses trilogy, as well as The Housing Lark), and grapple with the existential and material negotiations of a Caribbean/emergent Black British diaspora.¹ His most often cited work is The Lonely Londoners (1956), which describes the Windrush generation of West Indian migration to the UK (between 1948–1971). In essence, Windrush migrants intimately knew this “motherland” but “Inglan” did not know them (Johnson). Lonely Londoners depicts systemic discriminatory hardships faced in those years, as well as strategies of survival infused with humour, which has made the book prominent within post-colonial studies, a field itself defined by post-colonial migration experiences. Still taught today, this novel has received wider public attention in recent years for its unmasking of migration myths (e.g., “a better life”) in the wake of the Windrush Scandal in 2018. The Windrush Scandal revealed the creation of a hostile environment by state design against Black people, policies of deliberate forgetting of previous immigration policies under the British Empire, as well as an amnesia around the intimacies of empire, and the enactment of punitive measures against African Caribbean people (whether migrant or not), in some cases forcibly deporting people to countries where they had no ties (see Cummings, for the ways in which literature can help unpack the roots of exclusionary and expulsive migration policy). These anti-Black policies are an example of state machinations to make the colonially familiar figure, a distant stranger in their midst, as Stuart Hall described throughout his life.

Indo-Caribbean people also migrated to Britain as part of the Windrush generation; in fact, Selvon had migrated from Port of Spain to Britain in 1950, on the same ship as George Lamming (Phillips 34). While not directly targeted by the UK government’s policy of atmospheric hostility, Indo-Caribbean people also experienced vulnerabilities and estrangements during this period (see for example, Anonymous). As del Pilar Kaladeen and Dabydeen describe in The Other Windrush, if the overall history of Empire was not taught nor understood in the UK, the history of indentureship even less so. Thus, in addition to the challenging quotidian experiences of the Windrush decades, Indo-Caribbean people’s place of belonging was under scrutiny as they were not seen as ‘authentically’ Caribbean and were racialized in particular ways (see Mirza). Selvon makes light of these experiences in his comical short story “When Greek Meets Greek” where an Indo-Trinidadian character impersonates someone from India (adopting a “mystic masseur” exoticism) to circumvent a landlord’s discrimination against West Indians, only to be outed by an Indo-Jamaican, who himself was pretending to be a “genuine” Indian.²

These observations over the absurdities of ethno-racial categories–where Selvon’s writing excels–is also the product of his own lived experience. Dabydeen points to the anonymous reviewer of Lonely Londoners who describes Selvon as “‘born a Trinidadian but of Indian parentage’” [bold added by Dabydeen], which Dabydeen interprets as “[not] quite a West Indian […] he is not ‘quite the right person’ to describe immigrant life in London.” Dabydeen further argues that “this would have come as a surprise to Selvon, who was totally creolized.”³ Selvon himself concurred, as he stated:

This commitment to Trinidad “first and foremost”, accompanied by a refusal of essentialist roots, might make Selvon a seemingly odd choice to explore return migration from the Caribbean back to India, but I would argue that iterations of return are a companion to exilic identity, a kind of diasporic restlessness that we might see reflected in Selvon’s own life. Selvon migrated from Trinidad to the UK in 1950, and then from the UK to Canada in 1978. He died on a visit home to Trinidad, in 1994, in the archetypal non-place of the airport tarmac. In A Map to the Door of No Return (2001), Dionne Brand describes the diasporic condition as encompassing continuous motion rather than permanency: “Landing is what people do. Landing at ports, dockings, bridging, stocks, borders, outposts” (150). As Katherine McKittrick argues, Brand’s journey is not en route to a destination, rather improvisational, encompassing other experiences, returns, and silences. Black diasporic experience is thus “unexpected, rooted, and rootless” (104). Similarly, Édouard Glissant offers the concept of errantry to suggest that a “single, unique root” is not the primary characteristic of diaspora, rather it is a constant movement which necessitates a nimble re-negotiation of relations of place and identity (14). I wish to engage with Selvon’s writing as a map, not of Indo-Caribbean migration which suggests a unidirectional, settled move, but rather of Indo-Caribbean diasporic returns which require engaging with place in ways that are fitful and unfixed, restless and liminal, as part of a fundamental Caribbean diasporic experience.

For the Black diaspora, the ship holds alienation across time, as Hartman and Campt note, it is a journey without destination or a destination deferred: “There are no greater emblems of the making of the stranger than the Atlantic crossing and the ship—the slave ship, the banana boat, the Windrush, homemade rafts, and inner tubes. Captives, slaves, arrivants, lonely Londoners, boat people, and refugees are the stranger’s kin (26).” Another layer connecting the condition of stranger to the vessel of a ship might be added through indentureship, itself signified through the ship, for example in Mahadai Das’ seminal poem “They Came in Ships”; in the Indian Arrival Monument (a replica of the first ship bringing indentured labourers) in Georgetown, Guyana; or in the emigration pass which records the ship and year of arrival, now relied upon as a genealogical trace. For Vijay Mishra, “the [indenture-] ship was a space that outlived its original design,” encapsulating the trauma of dislocation, as well as the hope of return (qtd. in Cho 194). Cho also suggests the ship represents a trajectory where “the Asian is always already foreign (190),” as they were meant to be contractually temporary migrant labour, with a return-by date. The shadow of return contributed to, if not estrangement, a liminal space reconciled to “familiar temporariness” (Naipaul “Mr. Biswas” 174). This condition of familiar yet fraught temporariness originally stemming from the possibility of the return clause, continued to haunt indentured populations across various sites including Trinidad, Guyana, South Africa, and Fiji. As Brij Lal, points out, in countries where East Indians were minoritized, ethno-nationalist tensions and conflicts resulted in political and cultural marginalization, and out-migration with lasting implications to this day (10). Thus, the ship embedded in Arrival Day commemorations does not necessarily mark a typical narrative of migration (a genuflect to modernity–we’ve arrived!) but rather is haunted by an absent-presence of history–of the ship, the kala pani, and the corresponding transformations that indentureship brought. It is not surprising then to locate a “back to India” ship in Selvon’s work, deployed as a means in which literature might work through or even speak on behalf of half-repressed, half-forgotten memories of return that outlive the empiricism of colonial documents, such as the emigration pass.

Although Naipaul is the author to which many turn to understand an Indo-Trinidadian experience in the mid twentieth century, Selwyn Cudjoe reminds us that Selvon published a novel examining the East Indian in Trinidad, before Naipaul (13–14). That novel, A Brighter Sun, is the first fictionalized appearance of return in Selvon’s writing. I should note it is not about the East Indian in isolation, it is also about a friendship between Tiger (an East Indian) and his neighbour Joe (who is Black). Tiger confides in Joe:

Frank Birbalsingh argues that Selvon’s binary juxtaposition between fighting for “we rights” in Trinidad or returning to India is “naive and simplistic as if changing national identity was as easy as trading in a dhoti for western clothes, not taking into account some of the fractures of race” (8). Yet it is noteworthy that Tiger is speaking in creole and is aware of clothing as a saturated signifier for alien culture and religion. Selvon returns to the relationship between Tiger and Joe in his novel Turn Again Tiger. Tiger wonders about his future under West Indian Federation, that is during a period when Indo-Trinidadian people had put down roots with a sizable population in Trinidad, some of whom felt anxiety at becoming a demographic minority within the larger pan-Caribbean. Joe responds: “as for all-you Indians, you better watch out, ‘cause when we begin to federate it ain’t have nothing like vote for Maraj and Rampaulsingh …” (11–12). This changing mid-twentieth century landscape imbued with competing political demands was also entangled with return.

Policies towards a return to India were embedded within colonial governance structures. Indenture historian Hugh Tinker noted that return was ambivalently viewed by both Indian politicians and the British Colonial Office. Some representatives of British India were concerned that returnees would be rejected by their home villages upon return; others agitated for return as it was one of the limited areas of influence for Indian politicians under British rule. Some East Indians in the Caribbean agitated for return as well, to heal lost connections to a “motherland”. British officials, on the other hand, expressed concern that East Indians in the Caribbean “wanted to have their cake and eat it” too, that is they wanted to retain their status as British subjects but also turn to India for support when necessary (Tinker 33–44). In general, however, East Indians in the Caribbean were not a policy focus (Tinker 33–44), except for East Indian-based groups that saw themselves as safe-guarding cultural rights and representation in the lead up to Trinidadian independence. In 1958, the DLP (a political party with an Indo-base, founded by Bhadase Maraj) defeated Eric Williams’ PNM. This infamously led Williams to characterize Indo-Trinidadians as a “recalcitrant minority” mainly because Afro-Creole centricity in the public sphere was assumed. As Kelvin Singh points out, Indo-specific groups contributed to a divisive environment by reinforcing a “projection of the alien image of the Indian population (“Race and Class” 79).” Later, Williams would go on to say: “There can be no Mother India for those whose ancestors came from India.…There can be no Mother Africa for those of African origin.…A nation like an individual can have only one Mother. The only Mother we recognise is Mother Trinidad and Tobago…” (Williams 69).

Relations to return were part of the heady mix of Independence, Federation, and the changing times. I suspect that Selvon’s musings in A Brighter Sun, was inspired by the return voyage of the MV Orna in 1949. The last return ship known to sail from Trinidad to India is the SS Ganges in 1936 (Laurence, 1994); Selvon would have been thirteen years old. However, in 1955 in an essay for The Geographical Magazine, Selvon wrote about a “back to India” ship from Trinidad which sailed only “a few years ago” following Indian independence, and later in the essay “Three into One Can’t Go” he explicitly refers to a return from Trinidad to India in the late forties. The MV Orna which departed Guyana, made a stop in Trinidad before sailing onto Calcutta. Countries with ex-indentured labourers would often share the costs of chartering a return ship, particularly when they did not have enough returnees to justify the cost of charter (Ramcharan).

Built in 1939, the Orna was originally a cargo ship with a diesel engine, converted into an indentured repatriation ship (“Repatriates” 8). Prior to arriving in Guyana, it was engaged to carry repatriates from Fiji to India. From India, the ship sailed to Cuba with a cargo of jute bags, and then on to South America to repatriate another group back to India. In addition to a crew of 91 individuals recruited from East Bengal, and 320 repatriate passengers from Guiana, there were also a few tourists planning to visit India (“MV Orna Arrives” 1). One of the tourists included the doctor charged with caring for the safe passage of returnees, Surgeon Superintendent Dr. Jung Bahadur Singh, who planned to visit his father’s home of Nepal (“Back to India” 3).⁴ Not including the first return ships the Orna carried, thus far, the smallest number of passengers back to India. Its passenger numbers would have been slightly higher if fourteen stowaways (described as “13 Indians and 1 Negro”) were not discovered before the ship’s departure (“Back-to-India” 3). While one might assume the Indian stowaways had sentimental ties to ‘origin,’ the Black stowaway had a different interest in transnational mobility; he hoped to see John Trim, a cricket player from Guyana, play during the West Indies cricket tour of India (November 1948-February 1949). One large family (with seven children) was returning not to India, but to the new South Asian Muslim homeland of Pakistan. Another man reported that he was: “‘fed up’ of this country [Guiana] …They want us to work for nothing,’” as recorded in an article documenting the savings repatriated to India (“Repatriates Remit $96,000” 2).⁵

Personal reasons for return were varied, but Selvon linked this last return voyage from Trinidad directly to Indian independence, in his non-fiction survey of the region entitled “The West Indian Patchwork,” written for London’s Royal Geographical Society:

Selvon suggests that after India achieved independence, an originary home (at least for some), was reoriented or reactivated deeply in their psyche and entwined with the prospects of an Independent India. Furthermore Selvon portrayed, not a Back-to-India social movement or philosophy akin to Marcus Garvey’s Black Star Line, but at least protest activities in which individuals, with the wherewithal to write Prime Minister Nehru,⁶ displayed a fervent desire to collectively leave the Caribbean for the possibilities of an independent India. This was not speculation on Selvon’s behalf. Mahatma Gandhi, writing in 1926, also commented that “the desire to visit their motherland and the rumour that India had obtained self-government were the two chief reasons which led them to leave their birthplace [in the sugar colonies] (qtd. in Chaturvedi and Sannyasi 9).” We should remember that to successfully agitate for the right to leave the colony of Trinidad (which gained associated statehood with Tobago in 1956 but did not achieve Independence until 1962) to return to an Independent India (achieved in 1947, two years before the MV Orna sailed) was undoubtedly an anti-colonial act. However, as Brah reminds us “The question is not simply who travels, but when, how, and under what circumstances? (182)”; although anti-colonial in its action, return still relied on the return passage clause in the original indenture contract. The case for return presumably had to be pressed (to the point of threatening mass suicide) because the British Colonial Office no longer felt return was their responsibility, thirty-two years after indentureship ended.

In his play “Home Sweet India”, written for the BBC, we see Selvon once again asserting a return to India against the backdrop of independence. Return is the main thread of the play, where Johnny, a jewellery shop owner, gives voice to the demand:

The right of return (traced to the indenture contract) as portrayed in the play is integral to the process of working through place and belonging in Trinidad, across generations, gender, and class. Taj, Johnny’s younger shop assistant, thinks return is for older folks. For his generation Taj asks: “…what we got in India?” Johnny retorts: “What you got in Trinidad?” and Taj asserts a second-generation birthright: “I born here” (105). Similarly, Johnny’s wife, Mary, is not interested in return, rather she is focused on finding their daughter, Julia, a lawyer or doctor to marry. As for Julia, she says “I know nothing about India…” (106) and thinks her father is “crack in the head” for wanting to go back (109). The threat of mass suicide if there is no return ship, re-appears in the play, in fictional form, echoing a news article that Selvon had written two decades earlier for the Coventry Evening Telegraph, entitled “East Indians Threaten Mass Suicide” in which he describes returnees as “getting old” and wanting to “touch the sacred shores of the Ganges before they die;” although in both the play and the article the phenomenon of a mass suicide threat is unexplained (10).⁷

Selvon’s novel, An Island is A World, is where we find his most extensive reflection on return. This novel has not received much critical attention, but as Ken Ramchand notes in his introduction, “this is the Selvon novel that lies behind all the other Selvon novels.” While Ramchand suggests this is because the novel appears autobiographical, he also notes An Island is A World reveals Selvon’s philosophical side.⁸ For me, it showcases Selvon’s philosophy of geography, not only does it open with a spinning globe, it portrays the mid-20th century at a time, when the sun is setting on the empire, US imperial power is rising, and seemingly everyday, new countries are appearing on the map. Against this backdrop, every character is searching for the meaning of home, whether in Trinidad or outside of it (Salick 78).

The book opens with Trinidadian-born Foster, whose vision of the continents of Europe, Africa, Australia, and the Americas appear “like giant shadows above and below,” and Trinidad, as a dot on the map, but:

The image of a radio tower on top of a rotating globe was the opening logo of RKO pictures, an American company whose films were shown in Trinidadian cinemas. While also a depiction of entwined globalization, foreign power and corporate interest, Foster’s vision suggests attendant migration opportunities, where centrifugal forces could abolish the binary of imperial centre/colonial margins.⁹

However, later in the novel Foster’s Trinidadian-influenced vision of the world is shattered: “I used to think we’d be able to fit in anywhere, with anybody, that we wouldn’t have prejudices or narrow feelings of loyalty” (“An Island” 106; qtd. in Donnell 88). He realizes that the promise of migration is limited due to nationalism. The world is made up of nations; one cannot belong to the world (i.e., be a universal or cosmopolitan citizen) “because the world won’t have you.” One must belong to a nation (“An Island”106).

Foster then reflects upon returnees to India and their “anxiety to have something to belong to” (Ramchand viii):

These returnees had a concealed knowledge (or feeling) of “home” not destroyed by indentureship and colonialism. However, anti-colonial nationalism (whether in Trinidad or India) called persons to name and place themselves within discrete national categories which did not necessarily reflect heterogeneous ties.

A further contemplation on the push and pulls of heterogenous identity appears, in 1978, at The University of the West Indies inaugural conference on East Indians in the Caribbean, where Selvon gave a memorable presentation entitled “Three into One Can’t Go —East Indian, Trinidadian, Westindian” which focused on the historical and continuing comess of identity for Caribbean peoples, from Columbus to the present day. The title refers to his own navigations through the terms East Indian/West Indian/ and Trinidadian, and the experiences of being ethno-racially coded. Written over a quarter century after his first novel, A Brighter Sun, this essay offers us a glimpse into why Selvon considered return a significant moment in history, given his life experiences and the social-political context of the Caribbean and its diaspora.

As he illustrated with various examples, a slipperiness of racial and national identity is necessary to navigate Caribbean time and place. When in London, he had worked at the Indian embassy, where his colleagues were suspicious of someone like him–an Indian, not from India, who did not speak an Indian language. Selvon found that he did not have much in common with them, in terms of culture, although he notes that the colonial context of Trinidad stigmatized being insufficiently Western (“Three into One” 9). Nor did his embassy colleagues identify with the struggles of West Indians, such as the protests against racism in Notting Hill (“Three into One” 9). Where Selvon found like-minded community was with other West Indians, especially because a “communal defence,” that is a shared regional identity, was integral to surviving the white-ruled spaces of Britain (“Three into One” 9). Although Federation had failed, the experience of being in diaspora, and meeting people from across the region, provided Selvon with a language, a repertoire, and a possibility of being held within a diasporic family of Caribbean people. He marks a shift in the seventies, with Black Power. Not only was an Indo-Trinidadian not accepted by those from India, but he was also not included in Black Power, which presented a separate past and future for Indo and Afro-Caribbean peoples, respectively.¹⁰

Within this essay reflecting upon fragmentations, reconstitutions, and adaptations of identity, Selvon once again turns to the significance of the last return to India pointing out that Nehru himself rejected calls for repatriation and encouraged those in the Caribbean to remain where they were. An independent India at this time was concerned with ideas of internal coherence, and less with the diaspora. Selvon also suggests that (racial) identification with Indian Independence came mostly from the rural or working classes “where the majority were still adhering, or trying to adhere, to the traditions and customs brought from India” (“Three Into One” 16). He goes on to call the last return from Trinidad to India (in the late forties) “one of the most important events in our history: certainly a milestone, relating back as it did to the terms of Indentureship when the first Indians landed on these shores” and urges those at the conference, to record this history “setting out both facts and figures with analysis and description of the times in which it occurred” (“Three into One” 16).

Evidently, Selvon saw the last return as a fundamental moment within the Indo-Caribbean experience. This is the moment that bears witness to a shifting recognition that home and motherland would not be seen in the same way again, at least not as an option for permanent return. With his commanding statement given in the context of Indo-Caribbean scholarly emergence, Selvon recognized that the last return ship (a lingering after-effect of Indentureship) was fundamental to understanding the movements of Indo-Caribbean historical geographies, and part of a Caribbean relations. He also implies that Indo-Caribbean identity is not marked by Arrival Day, but rather by continual movement which makes the last return as important as the first arrival to thinking fragmented Caribbean identities.

It is not surprising that we find an extended treatment of return, primarily in literature (despite the seductions of the archive, I would not trust an archive of colonial domination to tell this history with any empathy). Moreover, social scientists who have studied the Indo-Caribbean have always found indentureship and its legacies difficult to characterize. Were they indentured servants? Immigrants? Labourers? Free? Half-free? Subjected? Post-slave? Coolie?¹¹ Scholars have struggled to describe indentureship because it was uncompromisingly harsh, yet after years of poverty, it produced thriving communities, to the point that we now have commemorations of the first ship carrying indentured labourers to arrive, though not the last to leave. What are the markers of significant moments, if this is an unfinished and still unfolding history?

Roots and return are ideas that have preoccupied diaspora studies, a field that has somewhat fallen out of fashion, due to concerns over reified identities. However, diaspora as a concept still has important uses, such as helping us to map actual and metaphysical confluences of return.

Seeking a way to discuss a back-to-India ship outside of the usual frames (primordial? irrational? racial?), within the relatively recent context of Indo-Caribbean historiography, was part of what Selvon was working through in his writing (e.g., Who and where are we in the world? Is home liberation or limitation?). Selvon, according to his friends, also had a strong pull towards home and always wanted to return to Trinidad, which some say he fulfilled in death. Looking back on the trajectory of his life and writing, presents an opportunity to reflect on the potential of new diasporic formations, such as a multi-spatial mode of belonging, which does not necessarily erase affection for origins but adds sediments shaped by transnational solidarities across our islands and diasporas, solidarities that might help us learn from each other’s unique formations within the context of multi-ethnic nation building. Return is part of a circle of movement that connects our archipelagic experiences.