Race and Gender in Trinidad and Tobago

According to Mintz, Trinidad and Tobago is home to a heterogenous, callaloo

culture, wherein the fragments of smaller groups brought by indentureship, slavery,

colonialism and wider immigration began to blend (as cited in Khan 2004, 6). Aisha Khan

notes that when the Indian indentured labourers arrived, Trinidad had already formed

structures of social relations (2004, 7). This placed the Indians in a liminal space wherein

they were not quite considered creolised, and were considered to be their own group that

retained cultural and religious norms. As Khan states, this cultural identity is a source of

equality and simultaneously functions as a means to reinforce hierarchies based in gender and

other identifying characteristics (2004, 13).

Thus, the Teeluksinghs Hindu identity functions as a way of both retaining culture

and also reproducing a familiar hierarchy. This can aid in explaining why their more

traditional, extended family in particular expect that Sarah and Dominic should retain a

certain dynamic as husband and wife. R.T. Smith (1963, 42) notes the husband-father figure

is considered to be necessary for the family unita family without one is dysfunctional or

deviant by social standards; the husband-father must exist to represent his family within the

wider community. Therefore, Dominics prescribed role is one of power and responsibility,

and it is unsurprising for his wider family to have concerns about his wife taking on more

assertive roles in the family. Anthropologist Viranjini Munasinghe (2002, 162) has also

described rural Indo-Trinidadian women were also more likely to enter formal marriage

unions and that there was a very low incidence of matrifocal families. Sarah, as an outsider, is

considered to be out of the norms of both race and gender in this respect. Munasinghe states

that family unit is one of the bulwarks of Indo-Trinidadian identityas evidenced by the

preservation of the organisation of the family unit, even when other forms of co-operation

and cultural exchange takes place with Afro-Trinidadian groups (163).

 When describing residential patterns amongst Indo-Trinidadians, Munasinghe points

out the complexity of the residential patterns and their underlying dynamics that she

discovered in her fieldwork (2001, 164). She explains that within her fieldsite, it was

common to find a joint set of householdswherein several structures were connected to

the main house. Many residences housed members outside of the nuclear family, and were

emblematic of the aforementioned joint house structures, while the others were separated

into spaces that were dedicated to each nuclear family unit (these consisted of a conjugal pair

and their offspring). This is similar to the Teelucksinghs residential organisation, wherein

extended family members and their own family units are all clustered in close quarters.

Munasinghe also notes that inter-generational rifts were apparent when focusing on

how men relate to their wives. Munasinghe notes that within her fieldwork, while many older

women complained about the mistreatment they suffered at the hands of their in-laws and

husbands, many younger men treated their wives with a more egalitarian mindset (2001,

166). Dominic has a similar mindset with Sarah, who is given considerably more leeway than

her mother-in-law. It should be noted as well that her capacity as an outsider also may allow

her father-in-law to accept this new position more readily than if Sarah were Indo-

Trinidadian as well. Though Sarahs mother-in-law is amicable, this was not generally the

norm that researchers found in the field; with younger women having occupations, and thus a

greater financial independence and a more equitable relationship with their husbands, they

were less susceptible to being bent under the potential power of their mothers-in-law, as was

common in the generations past (167).