Dear Editor,

I REFER to a letter (Guyana Chronicle May 9, 2022) wherein Mr Rampersaud is fiercely demanding that the name ‘Indian Arrival Day’ be dropped because that anniversary celebrates the time when Indian indentures were brought to Guyana in a state of neo-slavery.
(i) Rampersaud falls into the error of believing that the Indian Arrival Day anniversary on May 5 was a celebration.  It is nothing of the kind; it is a day of commemoration.  Thanksgiving Day in the USA and Holocaust Day among Jewish communities are similar to Indian Arrival Day.  People remember bad experiences “lest we forget”.  Rampersaud should now be comfortable with Indian Arrival Day.
(ii) The indentureship contracts were not made in Guyana; they were made in India before the girmitiyas left and were basically fair for Victorian times.  The neo-slavery and oppression of Indian indentures occurred because the Planter Class in collusion with the Colonial Government dishonoured and disregarded the contracts when they arrived in the colony.
(iii) A third misunderstanding and mistake Rampersaud makes is when he writes “the Indians who arrived here were illiterate”.  Indians brought their religious books such as the Bhagavad Gita, the Ramayana and the Quran and other books and it was because their culture was a written one it survived.  Rampersaud probably means that the indentures were not literate in English though there were a few like Bechu who even wrote letters in the newspapers.

Yours sincerely,

Paul Validum Ramlochan