THE CRADLE AS TRIBUNAL: RAAKHAS FOLKLORE, MATERNAL TRAUMA, AND CULTURAL MEMORY IN MAHABIR KUMAR’S INDIAN CARIBBEAN FOLKLORE SPIRITS

Abstract

Between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Indian indentured labourers, the Girmitiyas, were transported to British plantations across the Caribbean, Fiji, and Mauritius, where regimes of coercive labour, extremist violence, and social fragmentation reshaped familial life and reproductive experience. This research examines the Indo-Caribbean folklore figure of the raakhas, a monstrous newborn described in Mahabir Kumar’s Indian Caribbean Folklore Spirits, as a symbolic site where maternal trauma, caste marginality, and communal ethics converge. The study traces recurring images of aberrant birth, karmic reproach, fractured kinship, and ritualised infanticide. Viewed through the lens of feminist psychoanalytic and cultural theory, and drawing on Julia Kristeva’s theorisation of abjection, Barbara Creed’s concept of the monstrous-feminine, and Giselle Anatol’s work on Caribbean female monstrosity, the raakhas emerges as both a mechanism of patriarchal regulation and a displaced articulation of maternal anguish. Engagements with various feminist accounts of reproduction and caregiving further illuminate how motherhood in the diaspora is imagined as a site of ethical rupture, intergenerational transmission, and constrained agency. By foregrounding the figure of the chaamine (midwife), the article situates Girmitiya folklore within colonial histories of caste, embodied labour, and women’s authority, showing how myth mediates historical violence, reproductive politics, and fragile conditions of communal survival.