Bhojpuri beats and Bihar ki Beti: Decoding India's deep cultural connection with the Caribbean

In Sinners, the breakout movie of the year that showed that Hollywood is still capable of making movies that aren’t sequels or franchise reboots, musician Delta Jim tells the young prodigy Sammie Moore: “Blues, it wasn’t forced on us like that religion. We brought this with us from home. It’s magic, what we do.” He was echoing the stories of people moved miles from home, the music reminding them of their shared ancestral memory of suffering and pain, of being removed from their ancestral home and brought thousands of miles away to a strange land as slaves.

On Friday, as PM Narendra Modi evoked those same truths in Port of Spain, it wasn’t the blues he heard but the Bhojpuri Chautal. The drums, the chorus, the lilt of a tongue that once rolled across the Gangetic plains of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, now reborn in the Caribbean heat. He called Trinidad and Tobago’s Kamla Persad-Bissessar “Bihar ki Beti,” reminding her – and the world – that her ancestors came from Buxar, Bihar, and that India’s ties to the Caribbean run deeper than trade deals and diplomatic visits. It was a reminder that the journeys forced upon people can transform pain into music, memory into identity, and exile into magic.
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The Columbus Error

It obviously all began with Christopher Columbus, the Italian who thought he had discovered India but ended up in the Caribbean. The Occident, never one to bother too much about facts, called them Indios, thinking they had reached Hindustan . What Columbus didn’t know was that centuries later, the twain would meet. Not as spices and silks but as people – carried not by conquest but by indenture.

After the abolition of slavery in 1833, British planters found themselves desperate for new bodies to cut cane and plant cocoa. They turned to the Gangetic plains, signing up indentured labourers – girmitiyas – from Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, and Tamil Nadu. Between 1837 and 1920, over half a million Indians crossed the kala pani, the dark waters they once feared would sever caste and cosmic ties forever.

Across the Kala Pani: A Voyage That Broke and Rebuilt



In Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis Trilogy, this journey is rendered with aching precision. Sea of Poppies introduces us to Deeti, Kalua, Neel, and Paulette – their caste identities dissolving on the decks of the Ibis, replaced by new kinship: jahaji bhai and jahaji behen – ship brothers and sisters. They carried what could not be confiscated: Bhojpuri ballads, tulsi beads, and bundles of cumin and turmeric wrapped in old cloth as memory anchors.

Crossing the ocean was itself a rupture. The migrants believed the kala pani would strip them of caste, village, and place in the cosmos. But poverty is a ruthless priest, absolving all taboos. On deck, they formed makeshift families to replace those left behind. As Ghosh eloquently wrote, the journey was a death and rebirth – from bounded peasants to unmoored migrants forging a new identity amid salt spray and prayer chants.

When they landed in Trinidad, Guyana, Suriname, and Jamaica, they encountered a second crucible. The work was gruelling, the pay meagre, the overseers indifferent. They lived in barracks and thatched huts on cane estates, toiling under the Caribbean sun. But they survived. And survival, over generations, became rootedness.

Cooking Memory into Pelau and Doubles

In the Caribbean, they rebuilt life with what they found. Pumpkin replaced kaddu, cassava for arbi, plantain for banana. They ground masalas on improvised stones, cooked dal over wood fires, and made curries with goat or duck. The result was a cuisine that tasted like home but spoke with a Caribbean accent – Trinidadian pelau, for example, is biryani reborn with caramelised sugar and coconut milk. Food historian Ramin Ganeshram calls pelau “a Trinidadian favourite that plays off Indian biryani but browned in syrup in an African style.” It is chutney made edible – ingredients ground, pounded, mixed, fermented, and loved into something entirely new.

They built temples from bamboo poles and tin roofs, placing stone murtis brought from India or moulded from clay. They recited the Ramcharitmanas under hurricane lamps, their voices rising in Chautal and Chowtal – antiphonal Bhojpuri songs sung during Holi, weddings, and harvests. Ramleela became an annual spectacle: local boys playing Rama and Hanuman with sackcloth costumes and cardboard crowns, watched by grandmothers who still remembered the ghats of Patna.

Their language evolved too. Caribbean Hindustani – a creole Bhojpuri – fused with English and Creole vocabulary. In Suriname, it survives as Sarnami Hindustani; in Trinidad and Guyana, it lives mainly in chutney lyrics and temple chants. Yet words like nana, dhal, basmati, and jahaji remain everyday currency, testament to a stubborn ancestral tongue.

Chutney: When Bhojpuri Met Soca



If blues was the magic carried by African slaves, chutney music was the sorcery of Indo-Caribbeans. It is Bhojpuri folk electrified with Caribbean swagger – dholak beats fused with soca basslines and steelpan melodies. Lyrics toggle between Hindi, English, and Creole, telling stories of Krishna’s rasleela, rum-shop heartbreak, and gossip at weddings.

Sundar Popo, the godfather of chutney, captured this hybridity in “Kaise Bani.” His songs declared: we are neither only Indian nor just Caribbean – we are chutney, a third, ferociously hybrid possibility.

In 2012, Bollywood paid homage. Gangs of Wasseypur’s “Hunter” was rooted in chutney. Music director Sneha Khanwalkar travelled to Trinidad, recording Vedesh Sookoo’s spicy, risqué vocals. For Indian audiences, it was a fresh club banger. For Indo-Caribbeans, it was vindication – music born in cane fields now blasting from a Bihar gangster’s jeep.

Chutney competitions became carnival staples, with queens and kings battling under neon lights, singing in Hindi-inflected Creole about mothers-in-law, cheating husbands, and divine love. It was music as memory, survival, defiance, and joy – everything Delta Jim called magic.

Naipaul’s Double Inheritance

No Indo-Caribbean narrative is complete without V.S. Naipaul, Trinidad’s Nobel laureate and perhaps the first wielder of Shakespeare’s quill without a colonial hangover.

Born in Chaguanas to an indentured family, Naipaul chronicled his people with ruthless precision. His early novels, like A House for Mr Biswas, captured the small humiliations and fierce dignities of Indo-Trinidadian life – from temple politics and chutney singers to rum shops and Ramleela dramas.

Naipaul was the inheritor of both traditions: the Indian memory of epics and rituals, and the Caribbean’s relentless demand for reinvention. His critics called him rootless; his admirers called him a prophet of cultural truth. But whether in London or Port of Spain, Naipaul carried the same knowledge that Delta Jim carries in Sinners: what his people brought wasn’t forced upon them. It was their own music, their own magic.

PM Modi’s Reunion with Chautal


When PM Modi stood in Port of Spain last week, welcomed by ministers in Indian attire and greeted by Bhojpuri Chautal, it was beyond diplomatic protocol. It was a civilisational reunion. The Ram Mandir replica he gifted, the Sarayu water he poured – these were gestures. But the real bridge was in the Chautal beats, in the Bhojpuri words still sung after 200 years, proof that India had never left, a cultural version of what Einstein called ‘spooky entanglement at a distance’.

Columbus came looking for India and found the Caribbean. Indians came to the Caribbean and created their own India there – an India of dhalpuri roti and pelau, of tassa drums and chutney soca competitions, of Kamla Persad-Bissessar, the “Bihar ki Beti” who leads with Caribbean pride and Indian memory. An India that survived not by remaining unchanged but by transforming itself into chutney: a culture ground, pounded, fermented, and loved into something entirely new.

In Sinners, Delta Jim calls blues “magic.” Chutney is magic too. Because you can exile a people, indenture them, cut their roots – but you cannot erase their music. It carries memory, spices, prayers, laughter, pain, and hope. It carries home.

And that, as Delta Jim might say, is magic. Pure, unbreakable magic.