From Calcutta to Kingston

Abstract

‘From Calcutta to Kingston: A cartography of Coolitude’ meditates on the ancestral inheritance of the indentured Indian diaspora through coordinates mapping time and space, tasks historically completed by imperial powers upon seizing colonial lands. In this poetic-prose, coordinates anchor an origin – yet sugarcane becomes a new set of coordinates, following the call to unmoor the geographical fixity of origins invoked by Khal Torabully in his theorizing of Coolitude. This specific piece conjures the coordinates of indentured Indian descent among Indo-Jamaicans, a diaspora that has remained eclipsed within histories of Indian indentureship. Mapping the coordinates of places like Ashoka Road and Cockburn Pen in Kingston, Jamaica – significant sites of the indentured Indian diaspora – to the coordinates of the indentured Indian diaspora in New York City, the piece engages in its own kind of map-making: one that threads the echoes of indenture alongside its geographical uprooting, yet an uprooting that has generated a new form of survival among descendants of the indentured.