Dr Kumar Mahabir donates copies of his audio-cassettes to UWI

Please see acknowledgement to anthropologist Dr Kumar Mahabir who donated copies of his audio-cassettes which were digitized by UWI.

The tapes contain personal oral histories of Indian Indentureship in the Caribbean as well as recollections by the children of former indentured labourers. The audio recordings also contain songs, jokes, riddles, proverbs, charms, chants, folktales and folk dramas rendered in the original voices of informants in Bhojpuri Hindi and Pidgin English.

Some of these testimonies were transcribed and published in Mahabir’s book, The Still Cry (1985). Done in the 1980s in Trinidad, Guyana, Grenada, St Vincent and St. Lucia, these original recordings are a priceless, rare historical resource for researchers.