Mash and Multiculturalism

Mar 18, 2012 Features / Columnists, Ravi Dev

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Swirling around the last Mashramani – as has been the case for the last decade – were the usual accusations of governmental control of the event and the questioning of the suitability of the ‘cultural’ items for the commemoration of “Republic Day”.
Just before the event, the Minister of Culture introduced a ‘lecture’ in response to trenchant criticisms of the “wine down” culture that had come to typify Mash. One opposition spokesperson retorted that it was the government that had encouraged the ‘bacchanalian’ depravity, it was now implicitly criticising. She repeated the old chestnut that the PPP felt Mash was a “Black people” thing.
An intervention from Sandra Khan right after Mash criticised those that blamed sparse Indian participation to alleged PPP’s past discouragement. She suggested rather, that “The current merger of Republic Day with Mashramani celebrations offers little opportunity for including other cultures, traditions and sensitivities.”
The content of Mash, she declared, is “hegemonic”; originating as it does from a single cultural stream and assimilationist in its premise by implicitly establishing the parameters for participation.  As a missed opportunity, he proposed that “Republic Day celebrations…offer an opportunity to create the web that will link these separate communities and bind and unite us as a nation.”
A week later, in an unusually nuanced editorial on the discussion, the Guyana Times cited Stuart Hall’s crucial distinction between “multicultural” and “multiculturalism”. The former is the lived reality of a country with groups originating from different milieus and retaining aspects of their culture of origin. Hall calls this use of ‘multicultural’ – ‘adjectival’ – e.g. Indian Guyanese or African Guyanese and notes that it, “describes the social characteristics and problems of governance posed by any society in which different cultural communities live together and attempt to build a common life while retaining something of their ‘original’ identity.”
“Multiculturalism”, on the other hand, is a political process that is quite substantive. ‘It references the strategies and policies adopted to govern or manage the problems of diversity and multiplicity which multicultural societies throw up.´ It’s a process through which cultural differences are recognized, publicly affirmed and institutionalized. As with all political processes, multiculturalism as state policy (and Hall notes that ‘multiculturalism’ is invariably singular, while ‘multicultural’ is just as stubbornly plural) involves the question of power. In Guyana, the Times noted, “the question of who has the authority to create norms and social hierarchies within society or to exclude anyone and on what basis has been consistently glossed over.”
A SN online “political analysis” the following week blithely ignored the preceding interventions – even Ms. Khan’s that was published in SN.  It took a back-handed swipe at the government’s supposed role in keeping away Indian Guyanese from Mash. The government “must be seen to be actively encouraging its political constituency to be part of Mash.”
Coming to its criticism of narrow cultural participation, SN asked, “Is there any reason, for example, why the Mash programme couldn’t facilitate cultural and religious events – to celebrate and give thanks for the Republic – that allows all of the races and cultures to be part of the commemorative occasion.”
Then without any sense of irony SN continued, “Couldn’t the people who do such a splendid job to put the Diwali parade on the streets be asked to present that side of our culture as part of the Mash celebrations? Shouldn’t we be moving away from the repetitive, monotonous one dimensional Mash Day ‘wine down’ and seek to have Mash offer something for everyone.”
No question, such as was raised by Ms Khan as to what exactly should be the ethos of the “national” event to commemorate Republic Day.  Can Diwali actually be mixed with backballing? And this is the crux of the angst that underlies the periodic eruption of criticism of Mash. It is actually a trope for our registering our dissatisfaction with our prescriptive or normative “multiculturalism”.
While there has been, as the SN’s intervention intimates, an acceptance that “things na regula” with our state multiculturalism policies, there has been no comprehensive reappraisal of the clearly monocultural and assimilationist aspirations of our Republican Motto of “One People, One Nation, One Destiny”.
‘Multiculturalism’ demands that society present a full range of prospects, membership, and respect to all its members – regardless of cultural and religious differences –while also creatively accommodating them in a fashion that is both morally persuasive and practically effective for the majority of society. From this perspective, to paraphrase Gandhi’s famous quip on western civilisation, Guyanese multiculturalism would be a good idea.
Inheriting the assimilationist premises and prejudices of imperial Britain, even as the founders of our republic railed against the universalisation of the British specificity, they sought to impose a new hegemonic ‘norm” – epitomised by Mash – to which all must hone. As Ms Khan suggested, let us have a national discussion on our multiculturalism. Unlike the SN, we don’t think it should be left to the government alone. (To be continued)

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