The Editor’s Dictum

Jun 16, 2011 Letters

DEAR EDITOR,
Mr Adam Harris, Editor-in-Chief of Kaieteur News, saw it fit to append a note to my letter, “The (flour) Ban affected Hindus”. Every day in the letters pages of this newspaper, there are interventions expressing the opinions of readers on almost every topic under the sun that never earn this honour.
Indeed, the very topic of the PNC’s ban on certain food items and its impact on Indian sensibilities had already elicited several responses that had passed muster by Mr Harris.
One has to ask if it is the role of the editor to intervene into discussions that do not violate any rules of the newspaper.
Citing authority, the point I sought to make was that in the philosophical and theological tradition of Hinduism, adherents are exhorted to offer food to the Gods. I pointed out that when Mohanbhog – made from wheaten flour – and offered by Hindus who engage puja – became illegal after the ban, those Hindus became “extremely distressed”.
Their freedom of worship was affected. I accepted the ban affected all Guyanese, but that the reaction of Hindus had an additional religious dimension.
To this, Mr Harris’ interjected: “In India the Hindus do not rely explicitly on wheat flour. Further, in Guyana, Hindus, right up to the 1960s relied on flours that they milled—rice flour.
We must also wonder about what happened during the World Wars when food imports were hard to come by. Surely, Hinduism did not die.”
Mr Harris exposes the same hubris of the PNC when they imposed their ban on flour. It is not for the government or an editor to dictate to anyone as to the form and content of their worship.
I don’t know where Mr Harris got his information from, but in North India where the majority of our Hindus originated, it was from wheat flour that Mohanbhog was made. For millennia. This is the form of worship we brought to Guyana.
The only time rice was, and is, ground and used is specifically in the worship of Lord Krishna, when it is sprinkled on the Mohanbhog as “panjrie”. When cremation was banned by the British up to 1957, Hinduism survived, but that did not justify the ban, did it Mr Harris?
My son just bought “The wine of astonishment” by Earl Lovelace for CSEC. The British felt that the African elements introduced into the Christian worship by the “Shouter” Baptists were “barbaric”. The book details the traumatic effects of the ban on this group when their worship was disrupted in Trinidad during the 1940s. Looking out for police and running for cover reminded me of Hindus during the ’70s and ’80s.
The hardships of WWII were not the volitional act of a government in a supposedly post-colonial independent Guyana. Even the arch-imperialist British removed the ban from outer Baptists in 1951.
Two decades later, the PNC imposed their ban on flour. I am not saying it was the intent of the PNC to oppress anyone, but shouldn’t they at least have inquired into why Indians in general and Hindus in particular were so riled up?
Ah, but I guess they had men like Mr Harris who could have pronounced so conclusively on the matter.
Ravi Dev

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