EVERY GENRE PROJECT - June 11 - Chutney

Genre of the Day - Chutney

Album of the Day - Dance Party King by Sundar Popo (1995)

June 11, 2024

Between this genre and egg punk, I hope that by the end of this project I will have scraped together a strange but satiating musical meal of genres named after foods. If you’re not already blessed to know, chutney is a wide variety of Indian sauces made from fruits, herbs, or vegetables mixed with vinegar and spices. Chutneys act as sweet, tangy counterweights to the savory tastes of the main dish. Similarly, chutney as a music genre offers a sweet, sunny Indo-Caribbean flavor of music that reflects an underdiscussed legacy of colonization and modern fusion in the region.

It’s no secret that Americans aren’t well-versed in history, but one thing I observe a lot is the surprise that arises in a lot of Americans when they find out about what comes off as incongruent immigration patterns in other countries across the Americas, like that the largest group of people with Japanese ancestry being in Brazil being presented as some oddity. That shouldn’t really be a surprise; the US has some big fish to fry education-wise, given that 18% of adults are functionally illiterate. Even so, much of the lack of understanding of countries’ around the Americas vast internal diversity has to do with domestic education: we’re raised in the US to believe that we are the world’s melting pot, the foremost place where all cultures intermix and people across continents make the long journey to freedom for. There’s a semblance of truth in that—the US is quite diverse, but it’s a narrative that ignores the fact that a lot of migrants have made the same journey to other American countries, whether it be Brazil, Mexico, or our Caribbean neighbors.

The story of Indian people coming to the Caribbean was less elective, though, and was more a result of a heinous variety of indentured, controlling servitude utilized by the British after the Empire had outlawed slavery. They thought why not keep a lucrative thing going and saw that there was still a ton of money that to squeeze out of the sugar industry in Trinidad and Tobago. After having successfully wrecked the Indian cotton industry and taking control of its economic destiny, India was engulfed in famine and destitution. Many Indians were willing to go halfway across the world to islands they’d never heard of to survive. Nearly 150,000 Indians came to Trinidad and Tobago from 1840 to 1918. 

As we learn time and time again on this column, music is like rushing water: it pours out from communities, mixes with others’ music, and different elements create a conjoined a flow of their own. As decades went on, Indian Trinidadians’ music began to absorb the calypso rhythms popular among Afro-Trinidadians, intensifying after the country became independent in 1962 and a national identity encompassing its disparate peoples’ histories emerged. Spearheaders like Sundar Popo combined the rhythms and melodies of calypso and its already- Indian-influenced successor soca with increased Indian instrumentation including the dhokal and tabla drums, the harmonium (new instrument debut!), and singing in Trinidadian Hindustani. Below, we see the dhokal, harmonium, and the spindly dhantal in action as they provide the rhythmic and melodic groundwork to the sound of chutney. 

Today’s album is a late-career effort by pioneer Sundar Popo. Given the massive influence from soca, the fusion sound besides the singing in Trinidadian Hindustani may not be obvious on early tracks. “Chalbo Kihahi” and “Laiyo Balma[’s]” front-and-forward, sunny guitar and festive horns sound right at home among English-language soca tracks as later tracks. It reflects Sundar Popo’s musical skew, rooted in his vision of the tolerance and equality in Trinidad and Tobago, which he exalts on “Calypso on Mastana.” As a figure proud to be both Trinidadian and Indian, his view drives him to musically wear his ancestry with pride on songs like “Dotishboy” that pairs dhokal, tabla, and sitar solos with soca guitar, while drawing from the island’s storied musical palette on the party-pleaser of “Parbatee.” It’s a compelling statement in a nation where the colonial legacy of artificial division between Indian-Trindiadians and Afro-Trinidadians lingers; it demonstrates that national and ethnic pride are nowhere near mutually exclusive, and there’s musical joy to be found in honoring both.