ANDREW GIOANNETTI
Vinay Harrichan is just 25, but is what some might consider an old soul. He's wistfully nostalgic, with burning curiosity and a desire to learn something new about his heritage every day.
Harrichan is the creator of The Cutlass Magazine, a part-social media community, part-podcast, part-virtual museum, of which he is the self-professed curator. The podcast itself is a space where history, traditions and social issues of the Indian diaspora, are explored, but not sanitised, Harrichan told Newsday from Florida, where he migrated from Trinidad with his immediate family at the age of four.
The podcasts have featured several well-known and lesser-known guests. He interviewed physician Dr Visham Bhimull on the topics of Trinidad Bhojpuri (Indo-Aryan language) and revitalising Caribbean Hindustani.
He also interviewed Guyana-born Prakash Churaman, who was tried by a US jury, convicted and exonerated in connection with a murder during a home invasion in New York in 2014.
The Cutlass Magazine is symbolised by a logo depicting an East Indian woman in a sari, holding a cutlass.
[caption id="attachment_990785" align="alignnone" width="1024"] The Cutlass Magazine logo.[/caption]
"It's an all-encompassing symbol," Harrichan told Newsday. He is well-spoken and still sounds like a Trini.
"I wanted a culture symbol that (not only) Caribbean people, but people from post-indentureship (places) like Mauritius, Fiji ... would be able to immediately recognise as a reference to their own communities.
His audience, though mostly comprising Indo-Caribbean people living in the Caribbean and the US, also include people of Indian descent who have settled across the world.
"To me, the cutlass is, from a historical standpoint, intertwined with indentureship, in that it was the tool used to cut sugarcane, grass, and it persisted in various forms.
"But we also know there’s a dark history of it being used for violence, whether domestic or intercommunity violence."
It's also an everyday item found in homes anywhere around the Caribbean today, he notes, so it fits perfectly.
Harrichan came up with the concept, but his cousin Jivan Raghoo created the image.
When he started the platform, Harrichan promised himself to cover Indo-Caribbean history in its entirety – the good and the bad.
He said he did extensive research before launching his podcast in August 2020. He has released six episodes in all, but retracted two because of audio issues, and says he plans to re-release them with additional interviews.
Broadly speaking, Harrichan wants to highlight the diversity within Indo-Caribbean culture, including Hinduism.
The release of his podcasts have slowed within the past year though, but he said that’s for a good reason. Much of his time is spent archiving and collecting data, so he's an amateur historian of sorts. Harrichan never actually completed formal studies in history or social studies.
He is a software developer and data scientist, whose academic background is in English and political scien
