TODAY is Diwali, one of the most beautiful days in the calendar of this nation. Along with Phagwah, it denotes the enormous psychological pressure the indentured labourers and their children endured in British Guiana (BG) to preserve what they brought to the colony from Mother India.
The story of the holistic evolution of the Indo-Guyanese world in this country is a human adventure that symbolises the indomitable spirit of the human being. That these people survived culturally and psychologically in an environment that was hostile to them is testimony to the irrepressible mind that is responsible for the survival of civilization.
The horror show started when they attempted to enter the mainstream sociology of BG. Every obstacle was put in their way to prevent them from acquiring a normal existence. They were frowned upon by the society that felt they did not belong to mainstream society because their religion was seen as a potpourri of confusion and idolatry, their culture was inferior to Western values, their music was in a foreign language and they lacked an understanding of what aesthetics and pulchritude were as defined by the White colonials, the Portuguese and the Mulatto/Creole class (MCC).
Indian people in BG in the 20th century were treated as a class unworthy of national recognition. Even Crtichlow, a courageous fighter for workers’ rights, rejected the franchise for Indians in the 1930s, so did Jocelyn Hubbard. Even though Hubbard was a socialist supportive of Cheddi and Janet Jagan, as a member of the MCC, Hubbard couldn’t bring himself to accept Indians as part of the voting population. If Critchlow and Hubbard, two staunch progressives, saw Indians in that way, then it is logical to conclude that early 20th century BG derecognised the worth of Indians.
The game of survival was unbelievably harsh for Indians. They were denied voting rights, their children were denied entry into the popular schools and to exist in the bureaucracy, commerce, and the professions, they gave their children Christian first names (my name is a Germanic one and Germany is one of the countries I care not to want to know about).
At the beginning of the 20th century, Indians were regarded by BG society as several rungs below the other ethnic communities. But they persevered and lived with the humiliation they faced daily. Swami Aksharananda told me one of the driving forces for establishing a Hindu school in Cornelia Ida was what one of his friends told him of his experience at Queen’s College. MCC boys would laugh at his coconut oil ‘hair-do’.
I grew up seeing and hearing how Portuguese and the MCC people refer to Indians. What I read about the cultural contempt the society had for Indians, I witnessed firsthand at UG. I entered UG in 1974, which was a period when 99 percent of UG students were either lower middle, pure middle class or upper middle class. And I was catapulted into the eye of the storm.
At that time, the Faculty of Arts and the Faculty of Social Sciences were housed by mainly MCC students. It was in the Faculty of Natural Sciences that Indian boys and girls were found and a majority of them were from working class rural folks and were mostly Hindus and Muslims. I was a pariah in my Faculty (Arts) so I made a lasting friendship with many Indian students from Natural Sciences.
Former Prime Minister, Sam Hinds told me two years ago that in 1990 when the civil society group, GUARD, was formed to agitate for free and fair elections, there was a debate in GUARD about who should likely be the electoral challenger to the President, Desmond Hoyte PNC.
Mr. Hinds said there was a serious MCC faction inside GUARD that felt that the PPP should not succeed the PNC because Indians are not suited to running a country. Can you imagine this was as recent as 1990? We are not talking about 1955 or 1960.
There is a pathway to revisionist history that no one has gone into and it cries out for scholarly research. This is the 1960s violent conspiracies against the PPP. The literature so far points to ideology as the factor for the anti-Jaganite hysteria of MCC, the Portuguese community and its party the United Force. Anti-communism of these classes has been extensively discussed as the reason for opposing the PPP.
But what about the theory that the cultural contempt for the PPP, as an Indian party, was deliberately masked by the focus on anti-communism? Was the PPP in the 1960s deliberately attacked not because of Jagan’s embrace of socialism but because his party consisted of a “lower type of people” that should not be allowed to govern Guyana.
DISCLAIMER: The views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Guyana National Newspapers Limited.