 | This article is an autobiography or has been extensively edited by the subject or by someone connected to the subject.(February 2012) |
Kris Rampersad is a writer, researcher, lecturer, journalist, publisher, activist and advocate from Trinidad and Tobago.
Rampersad was born in rural Trinidad. She started her career as a freelance journalist at the San Fernando office of the Trinidad Guardian , before being called three months later to join the staff of the Port of Spain headquarters, where she has worked in various capacities as reporter of health, education, culture and politics.
She has written Guardian columns such as "Discover Trinidad and Tobago", "Teenlife", "Environment Friendly", "In Gabilan", "I Beg to Move", "The Week That Was", and "The C Monologues", as Literarily.
She served as editor of its U Magazine and Sunday Guardian. She covered most of the Jamaat al Muslimeen coup attempt involving activities at Trinidad and Tobago Television for the Guardian during July 1990. She was one of the founding journalists at Newsday.
Rampersad was the first sitting journalist/editor in the Caribbean to hold a PhD.[ citation needed ] She completed her PhD at the University of the West Indies following a bachelor's degree in which she earned first-class honours.
Rampersad holds awards in Journalism (BWIA Media Awards for Excellence in Journalism - Social and Economic Commentary and Pan American Health Journalism Award for Excellence in Health Reporting.
She received a Nuffield Foundation Press Award at Wolfson College, Cambridge University, the Foreign Press Centre of Japan Fellowship and a Government of India ITEC Scholarship to the Indian Institute of Mass Communication where she received its highest, the Rajasthan Patrika Award. She also received a Commonwealth Professional Fellowship and is considered a Commonwealth Gender Scholar.
In 2018, Rampersad won the National Medal (Gold) for Distinguished Contributions to the Development of Women/Journalism.
Rampersad is a pioneer and specialist scholar and educator about the intersection of education, media and culture in the world of new media. She has worked on media strategies for the Commonwealth Foundation and the Caribbean Institute of Agricultural Research and Development, and pioneered the Excellence in Agricultural Journalism Award of 2010. She has prepared, presented and published numerous papers on media, culture and gender including at Caribbean Cultural Diversity to UNESCO, Commonwealth Diversity Conferences, and Arcade/Acted. [1] [2]
Rampersad facilitated the training of multisectoral communities in Belize, Jamaica, Grenada and elsewhere in Intangible Cultural Heritage and community capacity development and preparation of dossiers for UNESCO World Heritage.
Rampersad was President of the UNESCO Education Commission, Vice President of the Subsidiary Body of the UNESCO Intergovernmental Committee on Intangible Cultural Heritage, and Vice President of the Commonwealth Journalist Association.
She founded, with Nobel laureate Derek Walcott, the Trinidad Theatre Workshop Fund for Literature, Drama and Film.
Rampersad has written several books. The first, Finding A Place: IndoTrinidadian Literature (Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle Publishers, 2002) explores the groundbreaking arena of society-formation and the socio-cultural, economic and political adaptations of early colonial migrants as well as the relationship between journalism and fiction in West Indian literature, tracing antecedents to the works of authors such as Seepersad Naipaul, V. S. Naipaul, Samuel Selvon, Ismith Khan and Dennis Mahabir,. The book is a ground-breaking study that gives context to much of V. S. Naipaul's perspectives on colonialism, the Caribbean and Trinidad and Tobago, placing his writings within the context of some 200 years' gestation in Trinidad and its peculiar social, economic, political and literary evolution. Rampersad argues that the society's complex oral and literary antecedents propelled his acclamation as a 20th-century Lord of the English language and that early experiences of journalism on the island experienced by him and his predecessors, including his father Seepersad Naipaul, legislator/authors as F. E. M. Hosein, Dennis Mahabir, and near contemporaries such as Samuel Selvon and Ismith Khan, influenced their leanings towards expanding the literary tradition in social realism tradition. [3]
Sir Vidia S. Naipaul himself commended the publication as revealing much about his father.
In Finding a Place, Rampersad challenges and rejects the notion of the term "East Indians" to describe people in Indian heritage in the Caribbean, and traces their migration and adaptation from hyphenated isolation inherent in the description Indo-Trinidadian or Indo-Caribbean for the unhyphenated integration into their societies as IndoTrinidadian and IndoCaribbean that embraces both their ancestral and their national identities.
Rampersad is also the author of Through the Political Glass Ceiling - Race to Prime Ministership by Trinidad and Tobago's First Female, which examines the role of gender, culture and rurality in the success of Kamla Persad-Bissessar as the first female Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago in the country's general elections of 2010. [4] [5] [6] [7] [8]
Rampersad also wrote and published LiTTscapes - Landscapes of Fiction from Trinidad and Tobago. [9] This was the official commemorative publication of the Jubilee/50th anniversary of the independence of Trinidad and Tobago. It captures Trinidad and Tobago's literary heritage up to the time of the Jubilee of Independence with photographic representations of towns, villages, cultures, festivals, landscapes, and nature, and more than 100 works of fiction. It has received widespread critical acclaim. It is associated with LiTTeas, LiTTours and LiTTributes, all of which are available on request Rampersad's GLoCal Knowledge Pot, a platform for education and interconnected heritage at krisrampersad.com.
In August 2019, Rampersad released her line of children's fiction with Festival Fables, with I the Sky & Me the Sea, The Adventures of Munnie Butterfly & Danny Dragonfly, Book 1. [10]
Harold Sonny Ladoo was a Caribbean novelist, who was the author of two books documenting the struggles of living in poverty in the Hindu communities of Trinidad and Tobago. He moved to Canada in 1968 and was mysteriously murdered while on a visit to Trinidad in 1973.
Indo-Trinidadians and Tobagonians or Indian-Trinidadians and Tobagonians, are people of Indian origin who are nationals of Trinidad and Tobago whose ancestors came from India and the wider subcontinent beginning in 1845.
Rudranath Capildeo was a Trinidadian and Tobagonian politician, mathematician and barrister. He was a member of the prominent Hindu Indo-Trinidadian Capildeo family. Capildeo was the leader of the Democratic Labour Party (DLP) from 1960 to 1969 and the first Leader of the Opposition in the Parliament of the independent Trinidad and Tobago from 1962 to 1967. He was also a faculty member at the University of London, eventually holding the position of Reader of Mathematics. He was awarded the Trinity Cross, the nation's highest award, in 1969.
Hinduism in Trinidad and Tobago is the second largest religion. Hindu culture arrived in 1845 in Trinidad and Tobago. According to the 2011 census there were 240,100 declared Hindus in Trinidad and Tobago. There are also various temples in Trinidad and Tobago to accommodate Hindus.
Indo-Caribbean Americans or Indian-Caribbean Americans, are Americans who trace their ancestry ultimately to India, though whose recent ancestors lived in the Caribbean, where they migrated beginning in 1838 as indentured laborers. There are large populations of Indo-Trinidadian and Tobagonians and Indo-Guyanese along with a smaller population of Indo-Surinamese, Indo-Jamaicans and other Indo-Caribbeans in the United States, especially in the New York metropolitan area and Florida. The Washington metropolitan area, Texas, and Minnesota also have small numbers of Indo-Guyanese and Indo-Trinidadians. Indo-Caribbean Americans are a subgroup of Caribbean Americans as well as Indian Americans, which are a subgroup of South Asian Americans, which itself is a subgroup of Asian Americans.
Trinidad and Tobago literature has its roots in oral storytelling among African slaves, the European literary roots of the French creoles and in the religious and folk tales of the Indian indentured immigrants. It blossomed in the 20th century with the writings of C.L.R. James, V.S. Naipaul and Saint Lucian-born Derek Walcott as part of the growth of West Indian literature.
Caribbean Hindustani is an Indo-Aryan language spoken by Indo-Caribbeans and the Indo-Caribbean diaspora. It is mainly based on the Bhojpuri and Awadhi dialects. These Hindustani dialects were the most spoken dialects by the Indians who came as immigrants to the Caribbean from India as indentured laborers. It is closely related to Fiji Hindi and the Bhojpuri-Hindustani spoken in Mauritius and South Africa.
Seepersad Naipaul was an Indo-Trinidadian writer. He was the father of V. S. Naipaul, Shiva Naipaul, Kamla Tewari, and Sati Bissoondath, and married into the influential Hindu Indo-Trinidadian Capildeo family.
British Indo-Caribbean people are residents of the United Kingdom who were born in the Caribbean and whose ancestors are indigenous to India. The UK has a large population of Indo-Caribbean people.
Raymond R. Ramcharitar is a Trinidadian poet, playwright, fiction writer, historian and media and cultural critic.
Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul was a Trinidadian-born British writer of works of fiction and nonfiction in English. He is known for his comic early novels set in Trinidad, his bleaker novels of alienation in the wider world, and his vigilant chronicles of life and travels. He wrote in prose that was widely admired, but his views sometimes aroused controversy. He published more than thirty books over fifty years.
Rampersad also spelt as Ramprasad or Rampersaud is a surname common in Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana, Suriname, the Caribbean, Fiji, South Africa, and Mauritius. It is of Indian and Hindu origin, derived from the Sanskrit words Rama Prasada, and is not affiliated with any certain caste. In India it is used as a first name, but the descendants of the indentured laborers in the European colonies used their fathers' first name as their surname. The name is common among Caribbean Hindus, but also as a result of ethnic mixing. It is also common in Christians as well. Many people of this surname have migrated to the United States and Canada as well. Sundar Popo wrote a song called Rampersad. Ramprasad is a common name among Bhojpuri speaking areas of the states of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh of northern and eastern India. From 1834 to 1917, indentured plantation workers from this region were dispersed far and wide across the world including the Caribbean, Suriname, Fiji and Mauritius. Prasad in Sanskrit means gift from god. There has been a long practice of having a second name, in general, in northern India. For instance Bihari, Kumar, Chandra and Prasad. These are not family names, it's just that the name is in two parts. A person called Ras Bihari may name his son Gokul Prasad etc. Many a times the two words are written as one for example Ramchandra or Krishnakant. Although Sanskrit word is pronounced as Prasad, in Bhojpuri the pronunciation changes to Parsad or Persad.
Stella Piari Abidh (1903–1989) was a Trinidad and Tobago public health physician. She served as the Medical Officer of Health for San Fernando and as medical supervisor of schools in south Trinidad. She is believed to be the first Indo-Trinidadian woman to become a doctor.
Mohamed Ismith Khan, better known as Ismith Khan, was a Trinidad and Tobago-born American author and educator. He is best known for his novel The Jumbie Bird, a semi-autobiographical work which blends Indian and Afro-Caribbean mythology and experience to explore the creation of a new Indo-Caribbean identity.
The Jumbie Bird is the first novel by Trinidad and Tobago-born novelist Ismith Khan. Published in 1961, the semi-autobiographical novel tells the story of the Khan family, an Indo-Trinidadian Muslim family living in Port of Spain. The novel explores the transformation of formerly indentured Indian immigrants in Trinidad and Tobago into Indo-Trinidadians.
Ramsaran Lionel "Sarran" Teelucksingh was a Trinidad and Tobago businessman and politician. The first Indo-Trinidadian elected to the Legislative Council, Teelucksingh represented the county of Caroni from 1925 until 1946 and was active in the leadership of the Trinidad Workingmen's Association (TWA), Trinidad Labour Party (TLP), and the East Indian National Congress (EINC).