Coolie Gang, Ghettos and Rastafari: A Story of Four Continents and A Couple Black Markets
“In most scholarship, the Rastafari movement is thought to have formed from a rethinking of biblical prophecies enabled by Black consciousness. Rastafari scholars have not sufficiently probed the tentative connections between the movement and Hinduism. Most map the movement in a dialectic between White oppressive Christianity and oppressed Afro-Jamaicans, which has produced a Rastafari that reappropriates, repurposes, and reproduces the Black and African ethos while actively disentangling the Afro-Indian intimacies that are found across the archives. Moreover, this view diminishes the agency of the members of the Jamaican lower class (the Indo and Afro-Jamaicans) to organize among themselves. This [audio] article... aims to excavate the historical silences of the Hindu contributions to the genesis and development of the movement’s metaphysics"
Additional Knowledge
BOOKS
Erased from Collective Memory: Dreadlocks Story Documentary Untangles the Hindu Legacy of Rastafari,” in Afro-Asian Connections in Latin America and the Caribbean by Linda Aïnouche
“Ganja in Jamaica,” in Smoke: A Global History of Smoking by
Home Away from Home: 150 Years of Indian Presence in Jamaica 1845-199 by Ajai Mansingh and Laxmi Mansingh
Journey From India to Jamaica by Henry Jaghai
Leonard Percival Howell and the Genesis of Rastafari, University of the West Indies Press
Pinnacle : Le Paradis Perdu des Rastas by Bill Howell and Hélène Lee
Rastafari and Other African-Caribbean Worldviews by Barry Chevannes
The First Rasta Leonard Howell and the Rise of Rastafarianism by Stephen Davis and Helene Lee
Transients to Settlers: The Experience of Indians in Jamaica, 1845–1950 by Verene A. Shepherd
ACADEMIC PAPERS
Curry Goat as a Metaphor for the Indian/Jamaican Future by Kirk Meighoo
Early Encounters in Colonial Jamaica: Hindu and Rastafari Divine Metaphysics by Dominique Stewart
Leonard P. Howell’s Leadership of the Rastafari Movement and His ‘Missing Years by Daive Dunkley
Rastafari Revisited: A Four-Point Orthodox/Secular Typology by K. Gandhar Chakravarty
The Impact of East Indians on Jamaican Religious Thoughts and Expressions by Ajai Mansingh and Laxmi Mansingh