'Habitable Identities'— A Review of Bindi: The Multifaceted Lives of Indo-Caribbean Women (original) (raw)

Our understanding of the complex journeys of women of Indian ancestry through several centuries in the Caribbean and its diasporas is expanded in valuable ways by Rosanne Kanhai's 2011 collection Bindi: The Multifaceted Lives of Indo-Caribbean Women. In a collection commendable for its multidisciplinary nature, we learn of the particularities of Indo-Caribbean women's agency in areas as varied as literature, art, beauty/cultural pageants, rural domestic work, religious performances, traditional healing, and their coping with the conditions of contemporary life. There is an unevenness to the collection as it moves across this disparate terrain, but in the strongest of the pieces, which include the work of Shaheeda Hosein, Gabrielle Hosein, Anita Baksh, and Paula Morgan, we depart from essentialized notions of what constitutes an Indo-Caribbean female subject to complex discussions of the multiple positionings that Indian women utilize in their engagement with concepts of femininity, Indianness, citizenship, individuality, and communal belonging. One of the most striking aspects of the collection and one that makes a key intervention in the thinking about forms of feminism is the extent to which the contributors reread venues of action that seem to be associated with tradition, continuity, and conservativism and find the nuanced ways in which Indian women transgress norms and clear space for the achievement of individual desires. In her essay " Unlikely Matriarchs, " for example, Shaheeda Hosein redirects potential thinking about feminist goals from a focus on the quest for individual liberation to that of the self-sacrificing actions of older rural women who had set their eyes on opening up possibilities for the next generation. In so doing,