Nachorious: The Nach Gyal as Post Indenture Caribbean Feminist Jouvay Mas

This event is co-sponsored by the Center for South Asia, the Center for African Studies, and the Program in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Stanford University.

Please note that this lecture is part of a two day exhibition. Click here for exhibition details. 

About the event

Created to play on the streets in Trinidad and Tobago’s Carnival in 2025, Nachorious is a Caribbean mas(querade) that commemorates 180 years of the Indian ‘nautch girl’ – variously figured as dancer, courtesan, tawa’if, devadasi, widow, bazaar woman, and sex worker - escaping British imperialism, dispossession, criminalization, evangelism, political punishment and impoverishment through the journey of indenture.

Stereotyped as notoriously immoral and sexually loose, indentured Indian women were framed as a threat to the colonial system itself. Remembered through the Carnivalesque character of a nach gyal or bad gyal mas, Nachorious dances in the decolonial spirit of freedom and resistance.

This Jouvay mas, performed in the hours before dawn on Carnival Monday and invoking both the rejected and otherworldly, is made with indenture records from 1867, text from Guyanese Mahadai Das’s poetry, historiography on the nautch-girl, and sonic embodiment of women dancers’ legacy for the Caribbean.

As Nachorious is a nach gyal - the spirit of the women dancers who arrived on indenture ships as well as those cast as immoral or stereotyped as prostitutes, there must be nach gyal dancing when tracing the historical and conceptual origins of this post-indenture feminist Jouvay mas.

Thus, we lotay [roll it]; invoking her journey from India to the Caribbean through sonic, embodied, licentious, collective remembering that insists on these bad gyals’ generative abundance in the colonial archive and their sisterhood and solidarity with the Afro-Caribbean jamette.

In this way, Nachorious offers a loose waist spiritual, aesthetic, archival, performative, and transoceanic methodology for feminist practices of memorialisation as well as post-indenture feminisms in and beyond Carnival.

This talk will be of particular interest to performance artists and dancers as well as scholars of British imperialism, Indian indentureship, the Caribbean, carnivals, and contemporary feminisms. There will be dancing.

About the speaker
Dr. Gabrielle Jamela Hosein is an Indo-Caribbean feminist scholar, writer and activist who received the Medal for the Development of Women (Gold) in 2022 for her contribution to Trinidad and Tobago. She is Senior Lecturer and former Head at the Institute for Gender and Development Studies, The University of the West Indies, St. Augustine (2016–2020), former Vice-Chair of the Equal Opportunity Commission (2020-2023) and has been involved in Caribbean feminist organising for thirty years. She co-edited the collections Indo-Caribbean Feminisms: Charting Crossings in Geography, Discourse, and Politics (CRGS 2012) and Indo-Caribbean Feminist Thought: Genealogies, Theories, Enactments (2016). Her publications include, “No Pure Place for Resistance: Reflections on Being Ms. Mastana Bahar 2000 (2011), “Modern Negotiations: Indo-Trinidadian Girlhood and Gender Differential Creolization” (2012), “Democracy, Gender and Indian Muslim Modernity in Trinidad” (2015), “A Letter to My Great-Grandmother” (2018), “Post-Indentureship Caribbean Feminist Thought, Transoceanic Feminisms, and the Convergence of Asymmetries” (2020), The Botanical Afterlives of Indenture: Mehndi as Imaginative Visual Archive (2024), and the poem “Chutney Love” (2019). Her blog, Diary of a Mothering Worker, has been published as a national newspaper column since 2012, and includes numerous columns on Indo-Caribbean gender relations and feminisms. The exhibition, The Botanical Afterlife of Indenture: Imaginative Archives, was first held at the Art Society of Trinidad and Tobago in June 2025.

Photo: The photographer credit is Abigail Hadeed