Indo-Guyanese writer Gaiutra Bahadur says:
“Dougla” is a slur meaning “bastard” or “mutt.” It has its origins in Bhojpuri, the dialect of Hindi spoken by the majority of Indians who migrated as indentured laborers in the 19th and early 20th centuries. In North India, the word was used to describe someone with parents of different castes. It had the strong connotation of pollution, since orthodox Hinduism saw relationships across caste as illegitimate. In the Caribbean, the word was applied to the children of black and Indian parents. Its sting was no less in this transplanted setting.
Despite the shortage of Indian women in indentured societies, very few relationships developed between Indian men and black women. Mutual distrust began with the first encounter, on boats from India where West Indian Blacks were seamen and Indians the human cargo. Indian women were sexually exploited by seamen of all races, but the crew were typically Black or white. And suspicions of the other persisted on plantations in Guyana, where Indians lived under a pass system that restricted their movements and kept them residentially separate from Africans — and where British colonial masters divided-and-ruled by placing Blacks in positions of authority over Indians, as “drivers” or sub-overseers in the sugar cane fields and as the policemen who often broke labor strikes and protests, sometimes with fatal violence. Africans, meanwhile, saw the Indians as imported scabs, a cheap and exploitable labor force meant to undercut their own bargaining power as newly emancipated workers. Cultural differences — language, religion, food — kept the two groups further apart. Exceptions existed. I found some century-old examples in British Colonial Office archives of black and Indian couples, but for the most part the two groups remained sexually separate, and “douglas” continued to be stigmatized. It remains a difficult identity to negotiate. In recent years, however, the word has been reclaimed, with scholars of the Caribbean from Yale to the University of the West Indies exploring what precisely the imaginative category “dougla poetics,” a sensibility in music and literature based in mixed roots, might mean. I wonder if it might also be fruitful to explore the parameters of a “dougla politics.” If the mixed-race voters, and mixed couples, I interviewed are any indication, it might mean a resistance to definition, a volatility that could challenge the traditional way of conducting campaigns and practicing politics in Guyana. As a group, they were difficult to pin down and open to contradiction. Concrete, sometimes seemingly minute matters influenced the way they voted rather than the epic, abstract canvas of race.
