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:
