Trinidadian sitarist, composer, and music authority Mangal Patasar once remarked about tan-singing",You take a capsule from India, leave it here for a hundred years, and this is what you get". Patasar was referring to what may be the most sophisticated and distinctive art form cultivated among the one and a half million East Indians whose ancestors migrated as indentured laborers from colonial India to the West Indies between 1845 and 1917. Known in Trinidad and Guyana as "tan-singing" or "local-classical music" and in Suriname as "baithak gana" ("sitting music"), tan-singing has evolved into...