Vinod Busjeet, Silent Winds, Dry Seas (New York: Doubleday, 2021), 288 pp.

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.13169/jofstudindentleg.2.2.0144
• Published date: 22 December 2022
• Date: 22 December 2022
• Pages: 144-148
• Author: Michael Mitchell

Journal of Indentureship 2.2 December 2022

Vinod Busjeet. 2021. Silent Winds, Dry Seas

(New York: Doubleday), 288 pp.

Michael Mitchell

Michael Mitchell is an honorary visiting professor at the Yesu

Persaud Centre for Caribbean Studies at the University of Warwick,

and lecturer in English at the University of Paderborn, Germany.

Though much has been made of the fact that Silent Winds, Dry Seas

is the first Anglophone novel from Mauritius to have achieved

wide circulation, readers of Caribbean fiction will be struck by an

impression of familiarity. The reason is not hard to find.

Competing European colonialisms that established plantation

economies have given rise to broadly similar phenomena. In

Mauritius, as in parts of the Caribbean, slave labour was followed

by a system of indenture, and later by economic decline as cane

sugar became less profitable. When the British took over more

colonies at the beginning of the 19th century, they established

systems of colonial control which left previous economic, social,

cultural and linguistic structures relatively intact. Thus, in

Mauritius, French – spoken by the previous planter elite –

remained the dominant language and the root of the widely

spoken Creole, while the administrative and educational system

were British. After the introduction of indentured sugar workers,

a vibrant Indian community established itself, retaining and devel-

oping its Hindu and Islamic culture, but also aspects of its clan

and caste features within the stratified economic and cultural

island society.

This is the society into which Vinod Busjeet’s protagonist,

Vishnu Bhushan, is born in 1949. It is a coming-of-age novel in

which not merely the central character’s initials but also the

DOI:10.13169/jofstudindentleg.2.2.0144