ABSTRACT
This chapter surveys the history and politics of Indo-Trinidadian mortuary ritual over 150 years of experience in the southern Caribbean. Indentured laborers were compelled to bury their dead upon domicile in the British West Indian colony of Trinidad, and Hindus adapted their mortuary ritual corpus known as antyeshti samskaar by condensing and creolizing it in connection with corpse interment. The effort to legalize cremation gathered momentum and triumphed in the late-colonial period, yet pyreside cremation took time to consolidate at the heart of folk Hindu ritual praxis, trumping burial as vernacular orthopraxy only in the last quarter of the twentieth century—well into the postcolonial era, several generations after the legalization of cremation. Indeed, this corpus has been recently revitalized and expanded, now organizing not only most local Hindu response to death but has also become the quintessentially “Indian” way of ritualizing the post-mortem condition more generally, including among Christian Indians as well, generating a novel form of Indo-Caribbean mortuary praxis incorporating Biblical exegesis and Christian sermonizing over a closed casket burned at neo-Hindu cremation sites. These developments can only be understood in relation to the changing political vicissitudes of diaspora, race, and religion in the colony as compared with postcolony, demonstrating the complex multi-dimensional dynamism of “folk” praxis at varied scalar levels.
