the Cutlass
“When the Indian woman, always potentially a “bad woman,” arrives in the British West Indies, she enters a landscape that both formerly enslaved Africans and contracted Indian laborers inhabit. Ideals of masculinity and the family structured liberal citizenship in the British colonies.
By placing Indo-Caribbean feminist writing, arts, and thought and Black feminist thought into conversation, through a dougla feminist theory of representation, we might intervene into literatures on colonial violence and representation: first by heeding the warnings against aestheticizing violence and then by considering the objects at work on plantations and between indentured workers.
Until recently, scholars have equated the African diaspora with the Black Atlantic, the site of the Atlantic slave trade. Likewise, studies of the Indian and South Asian diasporas have centered on the Indian Ocean and migration to the USA and Great Britain. However, dougla feminism follows insights in transnationalism to highlight that the Atlantic and Indian Oceans have been connected through trade, labor, and migration since the early modern period.
As I argued in my reading of “wife murders”in Bahadur’s Coolie Woman, the possibility of intimacies between Africans and Indians undergirds the fears of East India Company recruiters and Indian men alike—that Indian women would choose men of either African or Indian descent. The dougla also indexes the shifting meanings of race, gender, and sexuality in the British West Indies—how slavery and indentureship were structured by control over the sexuality and reproduction of laborers and how these laborers from sites throughout the British Empire created a new vocabulary around contact.
One object of violence is the wounded body that invites witnesses. But representation also involves how objects such as the cutlass reflect histories and legacies of labor in their form and function. The cutlass, the object at work, emerges during slavery and Indian indentureship and afterwards.
In successive moments, it is both an agricultural tool and a tool with which a person might inflict violence on another. The worker wields the cut-lass. He perfects the action of chopping through work and then uses that muscle memory in order to wound. The cutlass is therefore an object that repeats in order to link work and intimacy, slavery and indentureship, past and present.
The British Colonial Office and British West Indian planters thought Indians to be more reliable laborers than Africans who were agitating for higher wages and better working conditions after emancipation, though Africans in turn deployed a steadfast, “British” image. This discourse produced the “competing masculinities” between Indian and African laborers and, further, the anxieties about the sexual choice of the few Indian women on post-emancipation estates. Indian indentureship and African slavery have therefore been linked through discourses of race, cultivation and production, and labor. In this way, we can think of dougla feminism as a long-shared space and a historical-critical posture rather than a comparative project—which presupposes that the African diaspora and Indian diaspora, or Black feminist thought and Indo-Caribbean feminist thought, must be placed in conversation instead of having historical and intellectual points of overlap at their origins. While Indian indentureship in the region has long been understood to be a successor to African chattel slavery, dougla feminism understands slavery and indentureship and their legacies to be interdependent processes of capitalist accumulation.”
-Cutlass: Objects Toward a Theory of Representation, Kaneesha Cherelle Parsard