Theorising the Troubled Black Waters

Abstract

The Kala pani, the Black Waters, was both existential as well as a code for surveillance, a reminder of the coolies’ wretched state. As an existential absolute—and this is its theoretical value—in the girmit imaginary (imaginaire), it acquired considerable ideological traction as a transgressive act, a kind of threshold that one never crossed or entered into, even though in its Hindu, ‘śastric’ definition it applied narrowly only to the ‘twice born’ caste or varṇa. This sense of transgression was reinforced by the fact that the ocean as Kala pani, in a literal sense, also carried the connotation of death since kālā (‘black’) invokes kāla or death itself. The transgressive moment, as a girmit cultural dominant, even if it were a ‘structure of feeling’ constructed as a ‘surveillance or panoptic’ problematic, acquired cultural capital of an unusual kind as it affected, in particular, attitudes towards the unchanging Hindu definition of caste itself. Although caste categories were brought to the plantations, the fact of Kala pani always haunted those who left home for the new land, and it is perhaps for this reason that caste itself became a lot more malleable in the plantation colonies. Regardless, though, what the crossing symbolised was a seismic, irrevocable break. In unarguably the most fascinating theoretical account of the cultural transformation that occurred (‘the jahājī-bhāī syndrome’), the Mauritian poet and cultural theorist Khal Torabully has transformed the experience into what he has called the ‘coolitude imaginary’, a non-essentialist mode of trans-cultural sociality that stands for late modern cultural displacement. This chapter attempts a theorisation of the troubled black waters with coolitude as its key structural plinth.