The Shaping of a Culture-Satnarine Balkaransingh

Trinidad and Tobago reflects the dynamic rhythm of a cosmopolitan mix of cultures where the Indo-Trinidadian contribution is significant. This has its genesis in the 19th and early 20th centuries when more than 500,000 contract workers, from various regions of India, were shipped to the Caribbean to arrest the labour crisis in these plantation economies. These indentured immigrants brought their religions, languages, rituals, festivals, cultural practices and other performative traditions and planted them in its fertile soil.