Hot Fusion, Tropical Beats

The spicy pepper mixture known as chutney in India has a second meaning in the Caribbean, where it’s also a type of Indo-Caribbean music with deep roots but a short history. It's also as diverse as the people who created it.

Chutney music goes back to the late 1950s, when a dance album called The King of Suriname released in the tiny South American nation of the same name. The music made a splash among East Indians across the region, and the singer, Ramew Chaitoe, became known as the father of chutney music.

Chaitoe sang primarily Indian religious songs known as bhajans in a Creolized Hindi. One song in particular, Raat Ke Sapne, became a dance hit that was popular for decades. The song is about separation, an apt subject for Chaitoe’s primary audience whose ancestors were brought by the British to the Caribbean sugar belt as indentured laborers to replace the freed slaves.

A decade after Chaitoe’s historic recordings, another Surinamese, Dropati, released an album (Let’s Sing and Dance) of traditional wedding songs that became another hit and earned her the title of the mother of chutney music. The King of Suriname and Let’s Sing and Dance remain two of the bestselling East Indian albums, though the genre itself has changed dramatically.

In 1970, a Trinidadian named Sundar Popo had a #1 hit song in Guyana and Trinidad with his song Nana Nani (which means “grandfather" and "grandmother”). Sung in Creolized Hindi and English, with lyrics like “Nana drinkin' white rum and Nani drinkin' wine,” the song was heard all over the islands in the ‘70s, and gave way to the term chutney for this form of music. Sundar Popo sang folk songs with influences of West Indian calypso sounds on topics that reflected life of the Indo-Caribbeans, touching on themes of emigration, repression, and discrimination in his songs. Other chutney music artists emerged, singing about everything from female oppression to life on a sugar plantation.

Today chutney music has gone mainstream, an amalgam of calypso and Trinidadian soca, using electric guitars and synthesizers, and Indian popular music and traditional instruments, such as the dholak (a double-headed hand drum played horizontally), the dhantal (a long steel rod played with a metal horseshoe-type piece), and the harmonium (something like a small keyboard similar to a reed organ). And it’s not just East Indians creating this music; Afro West Indians have gotten in on the act, and the genre has spread to a wider, mainstream Caribbean audience. A musician named Atiya all the way over in Holland shot to fame performing her own Indian soca music.

And as Afro-Caribbeans and Indo-Caribbeans migrated north, to the United States and Canada, so did the music. Record companies and nightclubs promoting this popular party music emerged, especially in Toronto and New York, spreading the Caribbean music scene further. Often, recordings done in the north make their way back to the islands. 

Earlier, some Caribbean governments banned or repressed chutney music because of ethnic discrimination. But by the early to mid-‘90s, both Trinidad and Guyana had East Indian political leaders, which helped lead to a renaissance of this type of music. In Guyana, Terry Gajraj had a top hit with an album called “Guyana Baboo” (Child of Guyana) that evokes nostalgia for Guyanese immigrants everywhere.

In fact, the music has splintered into a dozen other subgenres – dance, folk, hip hop, rap, even appearing in Bollywood films – but even as it moves from the islands onto the international stage, the music remains popular throughout the region and the Caribbean diaspora as the music of their roots, for East and West Indians alike.

Here are just a few popular chutney songs, old and new:

Chutney Pressure: 

Nani Nana:

 Marajin: 

Guyana Baboo: