Guyana’s Tragedy

Oct 24, 2010 Features / Columnists, Ravi Dev

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Over the last month or so, my family and I have been looking at the Mahabharat, which had been filmed as a TV series. It is the longest epic in world literature with some 100,000 two-line stanzas. At one episode per school-day and doubling-up on weekends, it will take us another month (at least) to reach the end. The children, however, have become quite engrossed in the trials and tribulations of the two families – cousins actually – that will eventually end in a cataclysmic fratricidal war. Interestingly, my wife had last viewed it fifteen years ago; heeding the Hindu injunction to absorb dharmic thoughts during pregnancy.
The Mahabharat is rather unique among Hindu texts in directly extensively with the world of politics and, as in the ’90s, I am once again struck by parallels in that ancient conflict and ours in Guyana. The Mahabharata is about the way we deceive ourselves, how we are false to others, how we oppress fellow human beings, and how deeply unjust we are in our day to day lives. And all the while holding fast to the belief that our position is “just” and that of others, “unjust”.
But there are no “pure” heroes in the Mahabharata: unlike what is conventionally depicted, the conflict between the two sides is not a battle between right and wrong. The Pandavas, the nominal “good guys”, are not perfect, and several who fight for the Kauravas, the “bad guys” are truly noble. The potential for “good” or “bad” lies in every human being.
In Guyana, I have always maintained that our history has conspired to create a tragic situation. Not tragic in the sense of terrible things happening – even though we’ve had more that our fair share of those – but in the way that Hegel interpreted Greek tragedy. As I wrote last year, “Hegel’s famous interpretation of Antigone as the paradigmatic Greek tragedy might be particularly apt to our situation. In this narrative both “sides” are morally right: the conflict is not between good and evil but between “goods” on which each is making exclusive claim.”
The “sides” I refer to in our country are, of course, the descendants of the Africans that were brought as slaves and those of Indians brought as indentured servants – both to labour on the sugar plantations. Those African slaves were dragged against their wills across the Atlantic to work under conditions of mind-numbing cruelty. “Emancipation” had to be bitter pill to swallow when Indentured labourers (Portuguese, Indians and Chinese) were brought in as “scabs” to undercut their demand for higher living wages. It was only to be the beginning of many manoeuvres to deny justice to Africans but it set the tone of what was to follow.
The Indentureds, dominated by Indians, countered that they were unwitting pawns in the British game of “divide and rule”. They could, and did, point to the increasingly meagre wages that they were forced to work for on the plantations in the subsequent century. Their demonstrated capacity to produce “two blades of grass where there was but one” under the severest pressures formed the basis of their moral claim to justice and equality.
As in the Mahabharat, both sides were promised that if they played by the rules, the “kingdom” would eventually be theirs. While we may rail against Durjodhan (and Burnham) for their overweening ambition, no one can deny that they were leaders of groups that had legitimate moral claims to power. Similarly the gambling away of their inheritance by Yuddhistir (at dice) and Jagan (with Kennedy and Duncan Sandys) cannot be glossed over, but does not vitiate the similar moral claims of their supporters.
That the two groups coexisted without major conflicts until the sixties was not coincidental. It was the majoritorian system of choosing who would inherit the kingdom in 1953 – as was the Emperor-making ceremony in the Mahabharat – that precipitated the internecine warfare that continues to the present. It was not surprising that the manipulator (the US/British here, Duryodhan’s uncle in Mahabharat) would inveigle one side to try to grab the entire pie. The “rules”, after all, made an exclusive claim to rule by each group “right”.
But we must concede that it does not make it moral. If we accept that as citizens of this land we are all equal, we must arrange the rules of selecting the rulers in such a manner so that both sides (and indeed all “sides”) feel involved in governance. Our history, if nothing else, demands this outcome for the sake of morality. In the next elections all parties should commit themselves to such an arrangement. The opposite, I fear, is the war of the Mahabharat, which let us not forget, destroyed almost all – including the group backed by God himself. War, we are taught, has no winners.

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