Then and now

May 16, 2010 Features / Columnists, Ravi Dev

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My piece last week on the arrival from India of my great-grandfather Rambishun in 1888, elicited animated comments from some correspondents. There were several queries on how different life was during the time of indentiture, which was ended in 1917. Growing up from the age of six with my grandfather, Ramlagan (b.1896), the eldest son of Rambishun, and my grandmother Budhnie, b.1901, I used to pester them incessantly about “lang time”. On the eve of retirement from the drudgery of plantation life by that time, they were quite happy to satisfy a child’s curiosity.
To me, a most striking feature was their relationship with India. India was a living, breathing country to them, while to me it was more of an idea: an ideal that was captured in the stories from the Ramcharitmanas, Mahabharat, Krishnalila etc that my grandfather would recount every afternoon. My grandmother’s parents had died while she was still a child but the people and places of India were still real to her. My grandfather would talk about his father’s village of Ishmailpur as if he personally knew the narrow gullies, the mud-walls that locked their houses in their courtyard away from the eyes of the world and the fields that his Cha-Chas (paternal uncles) farmed from dawn to dusk.
With the passage of time, that physical connection became ever-increasingly attenuated to such an extent that by the time I actually stepped off the plane on Indian soil in 1997, I still remember my faint surprise that I didn’t sink through some ethereal mist. With the second migration to the US and Canada, the connections have been strengthened where my relatives would as much hop onto a plane to India as to Guyana.
Another aspect of the changes from then to now is the relevance of the sacred texts (shastras) to the day-to-day life of the adherents. As I had mentioned, most of the indentureds has memorised passages from the texts – especially the Ramcharitmanas – from their attendance at recitals in their native villages, their participation in performances of Ramlilas (re-enactments by an entire village or by travelling troupes of scenes from the Ramcharitmanas).
The text as memorised, versus one externalised in a printed book, to my mind created a much more profound effect on the devotee. I use the words “adherent” and “devotee” rather than “believer” because in the world of the Hindu, unadulterated by Christian doctrine (as were the indentureds, by and large) one cannot “believe and be saved”. The Hindu’s actions determined his future – here and in the hereafter. From what my grandfather described it would appear that the memorised texts served as an omnipresent guide to behaviour in a period marked by constant flux and instability.
Rambishun was haunted by a passage uttered by Sri Ram – which became my grandfather’s favourite and a beacon to his own life – “It is the rule of my people, that rather would I die than allow my word to fall”. Sri Ram, after all, was “Puruhsottam” – the exemplar of man – and as one who prided himself as coming from Ayodhya, the birthplace of Sri Ram, Rambishun took His words most seriously.
He, Rambishun, had given his word to his wife back in India that he would return to take care of her and their son – but only after he had earned enough money to buy land. The fact that the decade of the nineties saw one of the great depressions in the sugar industry and a drastic decrease of the wage of indentureds (with an increase in their work –leading to the 1896 massacre at Non Pareil: 5 dead, 59 wounded) making it impossible to save anything – did nothing to temper his guilt. He had allowed his word “to fall”. (Incidentally, a small point of correction. Rambishun did not have to actually reindenture in 1893 for another 5 years, but simply had to work- while nominally free – for another 5 years to earn his return passage to India.)
Today, the Hindu is even more alienated from his shastras. We do our pujas (worship), yagnas (mass recitations), attend mandirs etc., but who acts as Sarwan Kumar to his parents, Bharat to his brothers, Ram as a husband and Sita as a wife – much less Arjuna as a warrior?
On the topic of shastras, during indentureship, while the Rancharitmanas was the favoured text of the masses, most yagnas were “Bhagwats” where the Bhagwat Puran – in Sanskrit and detailing the exploits of Sri Krishna – was expounded by the Brahmin pandits. It was only quite after the end of indentureship that the Ramcharitmanas took centre stage. Pandit Reepu Daman Persaud, as an asil (proper) Brahmin, took quite a bit of flak from his more orthodox brethren for spearheading this movement in his younger days. It would appear that he empathised with the aspirations of the masses before he met Dr Jagan.
The notion and observation of caste and caste rules changed dramatically beyond Brahmins giving official imprimatur to the mass text. This change began immediately after the indentured was signed up in India and was brought to the depot in Calcutta by the Arkati. The food there was cooked and served by individuals chosen by the administrators with no regard for their caste – and they all had to eat together. This was unheard of in the village where the strictest rules of commensality – rules for eating – were observed and enforced. A higher caste person would never accept food from a lower caste one – not even drawing water from the same well.
This process of breaking down the barriers between castes continued on the ships transporting them to Demerara as all castes slept, played, took ablutions – and continued eating together. Life on the plantations, where everyone lived in the same logees and worked under “drivers” of all castes became the norm – unlike the case in village India – and solidified the new dispensation.
I found it interesting, however, that while my grandparents did not nominally observe the rules of caste, they knew the caste of everyone in our village. Today, even this residue has disappeared.

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