ABU BAKR knows fully and well that I objected to Frederick Kissoon’s use of the construct “East Indian Mind”, not ‘mind-set’. By adjusting Kissoon’s ethno-political construction, and by misrepresenting my own response to the latter, Mr. Bakr has done grave injustice to the debate we should rightfully engage in. He should correct the mistake and allow us to proceed. That said, I am still prepared to make some preliminary comments on Bakr’s defence of Kissoon’s ethno-political project. Simply put, it could be argued that the project is to ridicule and abuse people of East Indian ancestry into massive political insecurity so that they become ashamed of themselves. This is done by formulating a static and ahistorical construct where ‘Indians’ are an undifferentiated mass, welded together by this thing called the “East Indian Mind”.
The said construction has no sociological, historical, anthropological, or philosophical basis; it only has ‘takers’ (such as Bakr) because it is constituted through a system of binary oppositions. This last taxonomical schema divides up the (Guyanese world) into the sacred and the profane, where the latter is underpinned by the ‘East Indian Mind’, and the former by all other groups.
Bakr himself seeks cover behind various categories and concepts (weltanschauung, histoire de mentalities), and schools of thought, or philosophers (Annales, Nietzsche). All of these, however, are employed only with convenience.
Let us take the Annales, a French school of historiography and history, perhaps most systematically articulated through the work of Fernand Braudel. Braudel states clearly that both synchronic and diachronic analyses must be used in order to get a good picture of history. In his famous essay ‘History and the Social Science: The Longue Du?ee’, Braudel made a distinction among three temporal speeds, viz, the long term (longue du?ee); the medium term (conjuncture); and the short term (l’histoire événementielle). The longue du?ee can last hundreds of years. A good example of this is the decline of feudalism the rise of historical capitalism. Another good example is the paradigmatic hegemony of the Aristotelian weltanschauung, underpinned as it were by the assumption that the earth is at the center of the universe. The moment of conjuncture is more cyclical and inert-cyclical in nature, lasting anywhere from a decade to about fifty years. This resembles the Kondratiev economic cycle. Braudel defined the short term as the ‘time’ frame of the journalist and of newspapers.
Now, all of this is relevant because the way how the ‘East Indian Mind’ is constructed falls squarely into the (synchronic) longue du?ee, that is to say, that it is almost never changing over vast expanses of time. I should provide evidence for this claim, because that is what good social science demands.
Kissoon implies that East Indians have capitalist ‘minds’. There is the word (construct) again. He does not say mindset. As I noted before the former is static and ahistorical. Incidentally, critics of the Annales School point to its ‘geographical determinism’ precisely because Annale historians usually commence their work from the unchanging topographical contours of a society or region. Bakr may want to read Braudel’s book – The Identity of France, if he hasn’t already.
Mentality or disposition is another matter. It falls more within the ambit of the conjuncture. Mindsets, therefore, are elements of specific historical structures. The most important point here is that mentalities or (political) dispositions can be explained by examining the factors that have shaped them, rather than positing them as part of a genetic code. Equally, elements of conjuncture (such as political attitudes and dispositions) are in movement, that is, they are elements of the diachronic development of social formations.
In Kissoon’s anti-historical and tropical ‘analysis’ (i.e. based on the deployment of tropes), all Indians are the same. They are all capitalists and if you are a capitalist then (in that scheme) you are an exploiter. (I suppose Mr. Yesu Persaud will be exempted from that for no other reason than the fact that Mr. Kissoon likes Mr. Persaud. Same for the late Boyo who was a big capitalist defended by Kissoon.  Boyo had some differences with PPP and that was enough for Kissoon to certify him as a good East Indian).
The logical question is then – what is the proper thing to do with exploiters? Mr. Bakr is well read and he knows the answer to that, which is I am surprised that he is willing to pet and fatten Kissoon’s ethno-political project.
Finally, and on a more philosophical note, I take serious issue with both Bakr’s and Kisson’s over-valorized agentic view of history. Their world views are too much anchored in the ontological and in the subject; the subject here is the ‘East Indian (Mind)’. I close by quoting M.Foucault on this matter. This said, “One has to dispense with the constituent subject, to get rid of the subject itself, that’s to say, to arrive at an analysis which can account for the constitution of the subject within a historical framework”. Foucault called for a “form of history which can account for the constitution of knowledge, discourses, domains of objects etc., without having to make reference to a subject which is either transcendental in relation to the field of events or runs in its empty sameness throughout the course of history.”
Let me say one thing in closing – you cannot naturalise the beliefs, dispositions, cultural practices, or even the behavior of any people based on their ancestry. No one ‘people’ has a singular Mind.