There is a mindset that some want to deny

Apr 14, 2010 Letters

---

Dear Editor,
Of course Guyanese East Indians may be characterised as possessing a “mentality” or “mindset”. That each of us possesses a “mentality” or “mindset” proper to the person and that the terms may describe attitudes particular to a social group, is beyond dispute.
The terms occur, legitimately, in the literature of several sub-disciplines in areas such as philosophy or political science or social psychology, cultural history….
But what has, occasionally, irritated some readers is the application of the terms to one or other of our racial groups, given the pejorative colouration that they have come to acquire by association with negatives such a “colonial” or “cold war” or “racist” or “macho or “seige” etc. Connotations of inflexibility, unreflecting pre-judgement and a specific backwardness are brought into the everyday usage of the words.
So it is not really strange that a letter appears in two dailies, signed Randy Persaud, in which the writer challenges certain named commentators, myself included, to address what he apparently sees as the racist and reductionist content in Freddie Kissoon’s depiction of Indo-Guyanese as possessing a certain “mind-set.”
Dr. Persaud objects to the use of the word “mindset,” with all those connotations, as did the Swami Aksharananda some years ago when I referred to what I perceived to be an Indian “mentality.”
In both cases there was expressed a doubt that the words have any scientific validity, and the suggestion that, in their common acceptation they was demeaning in some way.
But there can be no doubt that the terms have an established place in any academic discussion of attitudes and the behaviours that flow from them.
One is aware of the existence and contribution of the French “Annales” school of historiography which proposed and practiced a “history of mentalities” , cultural history then, or in French “histoire de mentalites.”
The idea of a group mentality, a “herd mentality” that leads to the kind of “group think” that Freddie Kissoon described, owes its origin as a phrase to Frederich Neitszche himself.
The use of “mindset” to describe paradigmatic contours in which human individuals or groups think of the world and its contents ,occurs also in the jargon of academic areas such as “decision theory” and “general systems theory”  etc.
A little research would yield much more on the usage in diverse fields of enquiry. A mentality then, is a world view, a “weltanschauung.”
Since Dr Persaud has been an academic he would be au fait with much of this, and having gotten its legitimacy out of the way,  we then remark that his objection appears to have less to do with the occurrence of the  word “mindset” as a neutral descriptive and more with that value-laden and generally negative weight it brings to a discussion of human habits.
There is of course no doubt that Indo-Guyanese, like all Guyanese and indeed people everywhere, have a “mindset” or set of cultural reflexes generated from a matrix of values that of itself merits study and description.
And Freddie Kissoon was writing particularly about a bias in the group that led to the reflex vote for the PPP and the sentiments of racial solidarity that powers it. It would be nonsensical to further insist that these factors are absent in our politics or to seek, as some have done, to source the said sentiment in an ancestral terror born of their contact with blacks and the “security dilemma” it engendered.
So the question is one of race and its actualised consequences; of how the mentality translates into action and specifically, political action.
Mentalities touch everything. The past month has seen reviews in the local press of some of the literature that deals with Indo-Guyanese culture and mentalities. We have seen in Kaieteur News Frank Birbalsingh’s review of a novel by Clive Sankardayal called Dark Curtains.
The attitudes to marriage outside the race is a major theme in the book, it would appear. We see at work the interplay of the novel’s characters with a changing reality. Coolie boy’s parents and family cannot support the idea of his marrying a non-Indian St Lucian. This as “mentality” could only demonstrate what was, in old philosophy, called an “axiology.”
That is, a system of values and valuation of people and things and an ethics, in sum a value system that provides the whole ramification of the cultural conflict that emerges from our racisms and prejudices.
The condition evoked in the book suggests a collective moral development arrested at the “conventional” level, (see Lawrence Kohlberg) where individual action and initiative are circumscribed by or subsumed in, and subordinated to the prescriptions and requirements of the group.
That Dr Clem Seecharan, (in a book on cricket “ From Ranji to Rohan, Cricket and Indian Identity in Colonial Guayana 1890s to 1960s”) also speaks of an Indian mindset, is mentioned in a review done by Peter Fraser.
Fraser writes “Indian racism is presented (by Seecharan) as an inheritance from Indian cultural traditions seemingly unmodified by any historical experience in Guyana.” This is similar to Shiva Naipaul writing in “North of South” that Indians in Africa practiced a racism that was millenial in its span and unmodified by their new surroundings.
This is a description of a “mindset” effect that requires further study and confirmation. What the citations above are meant to illustrate is the fact that there are observable attitudes common to Indo-Guyanese as a group and that people like myself who have touched on this in our analyses of political or cultural phenomena are neither isolates not fanatics of any sort.
One thing has to be clear here, because the examples I have chosen concern Indians only.
What has to be clear is that my examples are chosen because Indians are the subject of the column by Kissoon and the letter by Persaud. Evidently it bears repeating that not all of the attitudes and preferences and practices Indian brought or developed here are negative. Far from it.
Indians have been examples of positive social values, coherent and quite advanced social and cultural practices often equal in value to or surpassing those of the established inhabitants of the world into which they threw themselves.
That the cluster of values with which they arrived and which they developed here, contained these granules of negativity that are, by the highest standards of the day, discordant, is inevitable.
In each group, in each mega-group and at all coordinates in space and time, an imperfect culture is located and is demonstrably in conflict with the ideals to which we aspire.
It is this choice, between cackling “awe deh pan tap” and moving towards the idea of a shared destiny with other races, that is fixed by the minset, the mentality.
Abu Bakr

---

---