The Cutlass Magazine had the honour of collaborating on a project last year entitled “Botanical Afterlife of Indenture: Imaginative Archives” with The University of the West Indies (UWI) alongside Dr. Gabrielle Hosein (concept and creation), Melanie Archer (curation and design), Abigail Hadeed (creative direction and photography), Nicola Cross (filmmaker). The exhibition was held at Art Society of Trinidad and Tobago in Port of Spain from Tuesday, June 10th to Saturday, June 21st, 2025 for no cost to the public. It featured original photographs showcasing mehendī (henna), a pre-wedding bridal adornment, and the cutlass (machete) used for agricultural tasks. Custom artwork included a recreation of the jahājī bandal (ship traveler bundle) in which Indian indentured labourers smuggled their seeds and cuttings from South Asia and replanted them in the Caribbean. A short documentary created by Cross collated submissions of culturally relevant plants, trees, flowers, fruits, vegetables from members of the Indo-Caribbean community living in the West Indies as well as among the diaspora. Almost a year later since the project wrapped we would love to share some of those visuals. These pictures were sent by Madan of Diego Martin in Trinidad and Tobago. He inherited a 40-year-old garden from his Ājā and Ājī (paternal grandparents), assuming the responsibility of tending to it from his parents. This is clear example of our project theme that the natural world is a living and breathing snapshot of ancestral lineage, carrying nostalgia and serving as members of the family. The images in order of appearance here are: neem, arahūr/arahūl (double hibiscus), paan, buttercup, peepar/peepal, single hibiscus, kush grass, chamēlī (jasmine), aam (mango), dhoob grass, and tūlsī (holy basil). Many of these pieces of vegetation are relevant to the worship, birth, wedding, and death rites of Indo-Caribbean Hindus. Do you also tend to a garden? Was it passed down to you from older heads? Please share in the comments! Would you like to submit photos of what you or your family grow and expand this Indo-Caribbean archive? Please message us!
#guyana #trinidad #jamaica #suriname #martinique
By some fate, I ended up in a conversation with three generations of scholars of Hosay. Dr. Satnarine Balkaransingh whose book on Hosay is encyclopedic, Dr Aliyah Khan @farfrommecca , who is the leading scholar of my generation on the Muslim Caribbean, and Robert McConney @hosayhistories , whose PhD research is connecting Hosay and Iran. Much immensely cool post-indenture Indo-Caribbean Muslim feminist creativity is to follow from this serendipitous meeting. More soon ✨
I had the pleasure of hosting Dr Satnarine Balkaransingh’s launch of his biography of Chanka Maharaj. So much essential reading about politics in the 1940s and about Indian men’s leadership of the call, ‘Indians and Africans Unite’ - decades before the 1970s. Prof Pat Mohammed gave the keynote. Dr. Balkaransingh is a national icon - choreographer, dancer, and poet with books on both Hosay and Ramlila plus more, and it’s lovely to be like his adopted daughter as he was one of my father’s few friends.
Please join us THIS SUNDAY for the 309th weekly ICC Sunday Thought Leaders’ Public Forum, Sunday April 26th 2026, in memory of Dr. Ameena Gafoor of Guyana.
Link in bio: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88698567489
ZOOM Meeting ID: 886 9856 7489
No Passcode
(3.00 p.m. New York/ Toronto/ Trinidad/ Guyana/ Martinique/ Guadeloupe), (4.00 p.m. Suriname), (8.00 p.m. England) (9.00 p.m. Netherlands/ South Africa), (11.00 p.m. Mauritius), (Mon 00.30 a.m., India), (Mon 8.00 a.m. Fiji).
Photos and videos from our “Caribbean week.” Over three events with Drs. Gabrielle Hosein and Gabriel Dharmoo, we explored what it means and where we get to when we engage with South Asia from its many elsewheres. Through masquerade, drag, and re-imagined archives, this post-indenture scholarship and performance moves us away from simple & confining homeland-diaspora relations to tenuous links and expansive geographies.
Nachorius brought alive the Carnivalesque character of the nach gyal in a Jouvay mas costume made with indenture records, Mahadai Das’s poetry, historiography on the nautch-girl, and made us roll our hips to welcome the spirit of the dancers who arrived in the Caribbean on indenture ships, celebrating bad gyal abundance and sisterhood with the Afro-Caribbean jamette.
Dr. Hosein walked us through her multimedia exhibition, “The Botanical Afterlife of Indenture: Indian Women's Labour and Imaginative Phyto-Archives,” where plants as co-migrants, brought in jahajin bandals, become a living archive of the afterlife of indenture, commemorated in women’s art forms like mehendi, godna, and rangoli. @botanicalafterlifeofindenture
Gabriel Dharmoo, composer, vocalist, and researcher, and their desi drag-queen avatar, Bijuriya @bijuriya.drag brought to us a masterful embodied theorization of how drag fashions cultural authenticity as a fantasy, much as it reveals the same of gender. Through their experimental musical composition and sound design, and moving in and out between singing and lip-syncing, they created magical moments of voices, bodies, and histories folding upon each other, unfurling new sonic and visual imaginaries.
🌱 We are honoured that our short film is part of THRIVE NYC 2026! Thank you to all our contributors. 🌱
dir. by @nicolaz.cross
prod. by @grrlscene in collaboration with @cutlassmagazine
for @botanicalafterlifeofindenture
📷 @nutanragoobir
SHOWING
Saturday, May 2, 2026, 1–5 PM
📍 155 Suffolk Street, NYC
CELEBRATING
Indo-Caribbean Creativity, Culture & Healing
Two-day exhibition:
The Botanical Afterlife of Indenture: Indian Women’s Labour and Imaginative Phyto-Archives
Dates:
April 15th - 16th, 2026, 9:00am - 5:00pm
Location:
123 Encina Commons
615 Crothers Way, Stanford, CA 94305
This event is co-sponsored by the Center for South Asia, the Center for African Studies, and the Program in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Stanford University.
To join an exhibition walkthrough with Dr Hosein from 12-1pm on Thursday April 16, please register at link in bio/events.
About the event :
Drawing on her 2025 multimedia exhibition commemorating the 180th anniversary of Indian presence in Trinidad and Tobago, Dr. Gabrielle Jamela Hosein explores the botanical as an imaginative phyto-archive. She examines how reworked forms of folk art can center the contribution of Indian indentured labourers to the Caribbean landscape through the seeds, spices, and plant cuttings they carried in the hold of ships between 1838 and 1917. In this history, visualised especially through portraiture, plants emerge as co-migrants with their own stories of subjectivity, settlement and adaptation.
Join us for a talk (part of a two-day exhibition) by Gabrielle Hosein, Senior Lecturer at the Institute for Gender and Development Studies at the University of the West Indies, entitled :
Nachorious: The Nach Gyal as Post Indenture Caribbean Feminist Jouvay Mas
Wed April 15th 2026, 5:30pm
Location:
123 Encina Commons
615 Crothers Way, Stanford, CA 94305
This event is co-sponsored by the Center for South Asia, the Center for African Studies, and the Program in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Stanford University.
Created to play on the streets in Trinidad and Tobago’s Carnival in 2025, Nachorious is a Caribbean mas(querade) that commemorates 180 years of the Indian ‘nautch girl’ – variously figured as dancer, courtesan, tawa’if, devadasi, widow, bazaar woman, and sex worker - escaping British imperialism, dispossession, criminalization, evangelism, political punishment and impoverishment through the journey of indenture.
Learn more and register at link in bio. Check out all our Spring quarter events!
