How Indo-Caribbean Families Stay Connected with India Online

When the Fatel Razack anchored off Port of Spain on 30 May 1845, its passengers had spent more than three months at sea. They were the first Indian indentured labourers to reach Trinidad, though not the first in the region: ships had landed in British Guiana in 1838, and the Lalla Rookh would bring the first Indian workers to Suriname in 1873. Over the next seven decades, hundreds of thousands of people made the same crossing, most of them bound for the sugar estates.

Their descendants are now among the largest communities in the region. About 35 to 40 percent of Trinidad and Tobago's people have Indian roots, Indo-Guyanese make up roughly four in ten Guyanese, and in Suriname the Hindustani community is the largest single ethnic group, at more than a quarter of the population. The arrival of those first ships is marked every year in all three countries, and large Indo-Caribbean communities have grown up in Toronto, New York and London.

Five or six generations on, the link to India is less about a particular village and more about a living culture: the prayers, the food, the songs and the festivals. For a growing number of families, much of that culture is now kept up, shared and sometimes rediscovered online.

## One phone, three countries

Ask an Indo-Caribbean grandmother where her family lives and the answer can take a while. A brother in Brooklyn, a daughter in Brampton, cousins still in Couva or on the Corentyne coast. The weekly video call has become the thread that holds it all together. On a Sunday afternoon, one phone propped against the sugar bowl can join a kitchen in San Fernando with another in Scarborough and a third in Queens.

For some families the circle reaches India itself. People who moved to the Caribbean from India in more recent decades, for work, study or marriage, often still have parents and siblings in Indian cities, and their calls home run on the same apps. Others have built new ties with India through business, pilgrimage or friendships made online.

These calls carry more than news. Grandparents use them to teach a bhajan, to walk a granddaughter through the dough for sada roti, or to explain why the family lights deyas on a certain night. Some mandirs that started livestreaming services during the pandemic have kept the cameras rolling, so an elder who can no longer travel can still watch a jhandi, a puja or a wedding as it happens.

## Keeping the language alive

Language is where the distance shows most. Most indentured labourers came from what are now Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, and they spoke Bhojpuri and related dialects. In Suriname, a local form called Sarnami is still widely spoken. In Trinidad and Guyana it has largely faded, though its words live on in everyday speech: nani and nana, aloo and baigan, choka and bhaji.

Hindi, the language of prayers, film songs and Indian television, has filled part of the gap. Many mandirs and Hindu schools teach it, and the cultural centres run by India's missions in Port of Spain, Georgetown and Paramaribo offer classes too. Younger learners add apps, YouTube lessons and films with subtitles.

What none of these easily give is conversation, the kind where you have to understand someone in real time and answer back. That is why some young adults look further afield. Indian video chat is one low-pressure way to get that practice: you are matched one-on-one with a stranger, can start by typing, and switch on the camera only when both of you want to. Ten minutes talking about cricket or a new film with someone in Lucknow or Patna can do more for your confidence than a week of flashcards.

Sites like these are meant for adults only, and the usual care applies. Keep your surname, address and social media handles to yourself, and use the report and block buttons if a conversation turns sour. The exchange often runs both ways, too. Plenty of people in India are surprised and curious to learn that there are communities on the other side of the world who still celebrate Divali, cook dhal and sing old Bhojpuri wedding songs.

## Divali and Phagwah, near and far

Festivals are where life online and life offline meet. Divali, as the name is usually spelled in Trinidad and Tobago, is a national holiday there and in Guyana, and it is widely celebrated in Suriname. In the run-up, the Divali Nagar grounds in Chaguanas fill with music, food and drama, and Guyana's Diwali motorcade lights up the streets of Georgetown. Relatives abroad now watch both on livestreams, and photos of deyas lining a gallery rail reach every cousin's phone within minutes.

Phagwah, the spring festival known in much of India as Holi, has its own Caribbean character. It is a public holiday in Guyana and Suriname, and across the region it means chowtal singing, abeer and coloured powder, and children chasing each other with water. Clips from Georgetown, Paramaribo and central Trinidad now sit in the same social feeds as videos of Holi in Mathura and Varanasi, and comparing them has become part of the fun. The colours look much the same. The songs, the food and the rhythm are unmistakably Caribbean.

Not every Indo-Caribbean family is Hindu, of course. Muslim and Christian families share the same history of the ships and the estates, and for many of them the link to India runs through food, music, family names and stories rather than festivals.

## Music, films and the sound of home

Hindi films have been part of Caribbean life for generations. For decades, the latest picture from Bombay was a weekend fixture at cinemas in towns across Trinidad and Guyana, and older relatives can still sing entire soundtracks from memory. Streaming has shortened the wait. Films that once took months to arrive now reach a living room in Chaguanas or New Amsterdam soon after they open in India.

The music travels both ways. Chutney, which blends Bhojpuri folk songs with Caribbean rhythms, grew up in Trinidad and Guyana, chutney soca carried it onto Carnival stages, and Suriname developed its own baithak gana. The tassa drums that drive weddings and street processions trace their roots to India. On YouTube and streaming services, a young listener can go from a Sundar Popo classic to a new chutney soca release to the latest Punjabi hit in a single sitting, and the comments underneath often turn into a meeting place for listeners from the Caribbean and India alike.

Cooking videos do similar work. Indo-Caribbean cooks film their versions of curry duck, dhal puri and buss-up-shut, and viewers in India are often struck by how familiar the dishes look, and how different they taste.

## Finding the village

For some families, the internet has done something earlier generations could only hope for: it has helped them find where they came from. Each indentured labourer was registered on an emigration pass that recorded a name, a father's name, a village and a district. Suriname's immigration registers can be searched online, and the national archives in Trinidad and Tobago and Guyana hold similar records. With a name and a district, families have traced ancestral villages in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, and some have travelled there to meet distant relatives whose own families still told stories of someone who sailed for the sugar colonies and never came home.

None of this replaces being in the same room. But for a community whose ancestors crossed an ocean with very little, a phone that can carry a grandmother's recipe, a Divali livestream or a halting conversation in Hindi is no small thing. The ties to India were never cut. They are being kept up in new ways, one call at a time.