“Douglas” is a term for the mixed-race offspring of Indian and African union in Trinidad, Guyana, and Suriname. Etymologically, the word “Dougla” refers to a person of impure breed and/or a hypocrite. While its initial usage was derogatory, in recent years, it has been used for positive self-identification and as a term that signifies a shared national identity. The intermixing of races, especially between those of European and African descent, is an accepted reality in Trinidadian/Caribbean society with calypsonians, artists, and writers highlighting racial and cultural mixing as an essential part of creolization and nation-building. However, the Douglas were bastardized by both the Indo-Trinidadians and the Afro-Trinidadians because phenotype variations such as skin color and hair quality governed their non-/acceptance into one ancestor group or the other. Though the Dougla figure is often absent from studies in social history and anthropology till the early 1990s, it finds mention in calypsos and soca chutney songs, the most popular ones being “Split me in two” by Mighty Dougla (1961) and “Jahaji Bhai” by Brother Marvin (1996). The term “Dougla poetics” reflects the changes in Trinidadian polity recognizing the Dougla as a figure of interracial unity. Shalini Puri describes the Indian experience in the Caribbean by divesting the Dougla of connotations of illegitimacy and infusing it with notions of political neutrality, racelessness, and progressiveness. Dougla poetics challenged Indian cultural subordination to Afro-Creole norms in an era that saw the rise of the Indian-dominated political party to power in Trinidad. In an atmosphere where racial tensions ran high, primarily because of the loss of power by the Afro-dominated party, the so-called cultural nationalists used exclusionary vocabularies asking the electorates to support their ethnic group. While society was opening up to Indians gaining political ascendancy, political rhetoric was trying to push back toward a discourse on ethnic purity. Rhoda Reddock hypothesizes that in the Caribbean a mixed identity does not imply multiracial openness, but instead carries the weight of denying any other identity (593). For the Indo-Trinidadian, the term Dougla carries negative associations of someone characterized by vice, idleness, mental problems, and vagrancy on the one hand and rural backwardness on the other. Reddock points out how the Dougla space, once theorized, was overtaken by the nationalists, leaving the Dougla voiceless, once again.