Trinidad and Tobago

Trinidad is among the most religiously plural societies in the Americas, and the plurality is a direct product of labour policy. The island was Spanish, then settled by French Catholic planters under a Spanish decree, then taken by Britain, so it entered the nineteenth century as a Catholic colony under a Protestant crown. After emancipation the planters recruited indentured labour from British India from 1845, and over the following seventy years well over a hundred thousand people arrived, the majority Hindu and a substantial minority Muslim. Their descendants are roughly as numerous as the Afro Trinidadian population.

The consequence is a public calendar with no single centre. Divali is a national public holiday, marked by lit deyas across whole districts and by nagar kirtan processions. Eid is a public holiday. So is Corpus Christi, and so is 30 March, Spiritual Baptist Liberation Day.

That last one records a prohibition. The Shouters Prohibition Ordinance of 1917 outlawed the worship of the Spiritual Baptists, whose practice combines Protestant hymnody and scripture with bell ringing, candles, mourning rites and possession derived from African tradition. It was repealed in 1951, and the holiday marking the repeal was instituted decades later.

Orisha worship, descended from Yoruba tradition carried by enslaved and later by free African immigrants, has been practised alongside Catholicism for generations, with orisha and saints identified with one another. It received legal recognition of its marriages in 1999, which is the practical measure of a tradition moving from tolerated to acknowledged.

Hosay is the Trinidadian observance of Muharram, the Shia commemoration of the killing of Husayn, grandson of the Prophet, at Karbala. The name is a rendering of his. It came with indentured labourers from north India, where the building and processing of the taziya replica tomb was already the popular form of the observance, and it took root principally in St James in Port of Spain and in Cedros.

The central objects are the tadjah, large and elaborately worked structures of bamboo, paper and tinsel built over weeks by families who hold the right to build them, together with two moons, crescents of red and green representing Husayn and his brother Hasan. The nights are sequenced: a night for the flags, a night for the small tadjah, then the large tadjah, then the moons, accompanied by tassa drumming that has become a Trinidadian musical form in its own right.

What distinguishes Hosay from Muharram elsewhere is who takes part. Hindus have participated since the indentureship period, and Afro Trinidadians have too, so a Shia commemoration is carried through the streets by a mixed crowd. That has produced criticism from some Muslim quarters, on the ground that a mourning rite should not become a festival with spectators, and the organising families have generally defended it as a mourning observance that others are welcome to attend.

The colonial state read it as disorder. In October 1884, after processions were banned from entering San Fernando, troops fired on the crowd and around twenty two people were killed, an event known as the Hosay Riots or the Muharram Massacre. The processions were later permitted again and have continued since.