not Indian or African

Important note from Esha: The word "dougla" in the Caribbean is used to describe someone who comes from both African and Indian racial/ethnic backgrounds. The term is also used in a very anti-Black way to describe folks, especially by those who are not Black. The word originates from a Hindi, possibly Bhojpuri, word to describe someone who is from a mixed/inter-caste background and is used in a extremely casteist and demeaning way. I can say from an Indo-Fijian context, it's also a derogatory term, sometimes casually used to refer to someone who is an asshole, but we cannot separate this usage of the term from its casteist and anti-Black origins.

"In this regard, I cannot help but place myself at the centre of these sometimes tortuous identity games by adding my own narrative of experience with the identity, being nebulously positioned as the product of a mixed race union, not quite Dougla as perhaps “half-doogla,” to borrow an identity formulation from Merle Hodge’s novel, For the Life of Laetitia to which I will return — my paternal grandfather being of Indian descent and my grandmother of African descent.

Yet this is not the whole truth. My maternal grandfather was of mixed ancestry (African and European) from one of the Portuguese Azores, and I have not included the strains from my mother’s people who came from St. Vincent and Barbados. So if I follow this rather unproductive and fractured genealogical map, perhaps a truer label for myself is not “half-doogla” but “travesaou,” that is, unidentifiably mixed.

I did not grow up in a particularly Indian or Moslem environment, although where ever we lived there were always Indian neighbours. My father had encouraged us to think of ourselves as “Trinidadian.” It was perhaps the result of the political rhetoric of nationalism in which my parents began their lives together in 1961.

Trinidadian was the only identity to which he would subscribe — not Indian or African or Dougla — and he claimed it with the kind of fervour that suggested a desperate compensation for some deep, unspoken suffering.

A nationality, not a race or an ethnicity, offered accommodation, a liveable identity space that allowed him the comfort of distancing himself from what he would refer to as those Africans and those Indians. He would claim neither category. I was sixteen years old when I met, for the first time, the woman who was introduced to me as my grandfather’s mother. She was very old and I met her a few months before she died. We had one brief conversation. I had no idea that it would be our last. She had entered our lives at a time when it was apparently comfortable for her to do so. I knew nothing of her until that day.

We were distanced from my father’s Indian relatives by some measure of ill feeling that, in part, had something to do with my grandmother being an African woman and loving an Indian man.

Years ago, while I was as an undergraduate at the University of the West Indies, a law student, a man from “up the islands” (I can’t remember now which one) asked my name, I suppose as a way of making conversation while we stood in the loan line at the Main Library, literally waiting to borrow, for a short time only, items that were not ours. I did the polite thing and responded, at which point something like disbelief surfaced on his face.

At the time, I was satisfied to think that it was simply the old difficulty, if that is the correct word, or curiosity, that comes with meeting people bearing Indian names who don’t really “look” Indian, even in a place like Trinidad. I ran into this man only one time after our initial meeting. I was in line again in the library, this time waiting to use one of the photocopying machines, inventions that facilitate, for a small fee, the miracle of multiplying originals, or copies of originals. On that occasion he said, “Hello.” I responded with some like greeting, after which he told me in a strange conspiratorial tone that I didn’t sound Trinidadian. It was my turn to look puzzled.

I remember he paused long enough to note my bewilderment, then departed. It took me sometime to figure out that the comment was his way of letting me know that he had caught onto me, that he believed I had offered him a bogus name at our first meeting. To him my name was a decoy intended as a brush-off.”

-Dougla, Half-doogla, Travesao, and the Limits of Hybridity, Dr Jennifer Rahim