Abstract
While praising Lakshmi Persaud as a pioneer of Indo-Caribbean women’s writing who created original and well-crafted feminine (if not feminist) perspectives of Hindu communities in Trinidad, several critics have called attention to the limitations of her feminist vision. For instance, Brinda Mehta has argued in Diasporic (Dis) locations: Indo-Caribbean Women Writers Negotiate the Kala Pani that “their author a product of her middle-class Hindu upbringing with its strict enforcement of female codes of behaviour, Persaud’s novels betray a certain caution and tentativeness of expression” (19). In a similar vein, Kenneth Ramchand has observed in his discussion of the young narrator’s perspective on male irresponsibility in Butterfly in the Wind that “the writer’s position seems ambivalent” (232).