The Nach Gyal as Post Indenture Caribbean Feminist Jouvay Mas

Ervaar een stukje carnaval met Dr. Gabrielle Jamela Hosein uit Trinidad en Tobago en kom meer te weten over de betekenis van publieke ‘street performance’ mas (maskerade) en Jouvay (carnaval) vanuit een Indo-Caribisch feministisch perspectief!

Dit evenement is Engelstalig.

Programma

15.30 – 17.00: Interactive lecture performance Nachorious
17.30 – 19.30: Get together incl. foods and drinks

Vrije inloop

Using music, dance, and gulal (coloured powder), Dr. Gabrielle Jamela Hosein, from Trinidad and Tobago, traces indenture history and engages the audience in a participatory experience of Trinidad’s Carnival to connect to nach gyal feminist politics and embodiment in the Caribbean today. 

Trinidad and Tobago is a twin-island republic in the Southern Caribbean that was once a British colony, but was also impacted by Spanish colonisation and French presence as well as histories of African enslavement and Asian indenture on sugar cane plantations. Carnival in Trinidad and Tobago emerged from these histories and African cultural practices. It has since further evolved through the influence of migrants from India in the 19th century and other ethnicities that have settled over time.

This year’s mas (Carnival) commemorates 180 years of the Indian nautch girl - dancer, courtesan, tawa’if, devadasi, widow, bazaar woman, widow, and rand or randi prostitute or sex worker - escaping British imperialism, dispossession, criminalization, evangelism, political punishment, and impoverishment through the journey of indenture. Stereotyped as notoriously immoral and sexually loose, the indentured Indian woman was considered a threat to the system itself. Remembered through the character of the nach gyal, Nachorious, she still dances in the spirit of freedom and resistance. This Carnival Jouvay mas(querade) is made with indenture records from 1867, text from Mahadai Das poetry and historiography on the nautch-girl, a nach gyal figure whose spinning in the air will be a dance of life, and ghungroos to sonically memorialize this history.

©Abigail Hadeed

Biography of Dr. Gabrielle Jamela Hosein

Dr. Gabrielle Jamela Hosein is Senior Lecturer, Institute for Gender and Development Studies, The University of the West Indies, St. Augustine. Her publications include No Pure Place for Resistance: Reflections on Being Ms. Mastana Bahar 2000 (2011), Modern Negotiations: Indo-Trinidadian Girlhood and Gender Differential Creolization (2012), Democracy, Gender and Indian Muslim Modernity in Trinidad (2015), A Letter to My Great-Grandmother (2018), Post-Indentureship Caribbean Feminist Thought, Transoceanic Feminisms, and the Convergence of Asymmetries (2020), The Botanical Afterlife of Indenture: Mehndi as Imaginative Visual Archive (2024), and the poem Chutney Love (2019), and the co-edited collections Indo-Caribbean Feminisms: Charting Crossings in Geography, Discourse, and Politics (CRGS 2012) and Indo-Caribbean Feminist Thought: Genealogies, Theories, Enactments (2016).

Her blog, Diary of a Mothering Worker, has been published in a national newspaper since 2012, and includes numerous columns on Indo-Caribbean gender relations and feminisms. In 2022, she was awarded the national Medal for the Development of Women (Gold) for her contribution to Caribbean feminist organising. Her June 2025 art exhibit, The Botanical Afterlife of Indenture: Imaginative Archives, was held at the Art Society of Trinidad and Tobago.

Credits

This program is made partly possible by CTRL+ALT.