Four great Guyanese that must be given official recognition

Dec 23, 2015 Letters

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Dear Editor,
The City Council initiated the idea of renaming 50 street names in our primate city of Georgetown in anticipation of the celebration planned for the Golden Jubilee of independence.
While this issue is probably going to be visited by President Granger’s National Commemoration Commission, fifty new names for the streets of Georgetown alone might be a stretch. However, name changes are not such a terrible thing.
Toponyms or names of places have been used for various reasons throughout history, not to mention setting the historical record straight. Many countries and governments have changed names over the years, including the names of countries and capital cities.
Some of these include, but are not limited to, Gold Coast to Ghana, Ceylon to Sri Lanka, British Honduras to Belize, British Guiana to Guyana, etc.). Georgetown was called “Stabroek” between 1784 and 1812, after it was named as a tribute to Britain’s King George.
I agree that changing street names in the city by May 26, 2016 is too “rushed”, 50 names may be too many and the City Council should occupy itself with more bread and butter issues that affect our daily lives.
However, the world does not revolve around the streets of Georgetown. There are many names that could be attached to streets and places outside our primate city.
In addition, there are places in Guyana without any official names, some of which were concocted by local villagers. What we need is a set of criteria and an appropriate methodology for doing so.
It was reported that at the City Council meeting, no names of enslaved Africans or indentured Indians were mentioned. I have a bunch of my own, but would mention a few that deserve national recognition.
First, I endorse Professor Lomarsh Roopnarine’s call to name a street (or place) after “Buchu”.  As Clem Seecharan reminded us in his book, Bechu (Odeen Ishmael identified “Bechu” actual name as Bhoshunath Chattopadhyay) was a Bengali, the “bound coolie radical in British Guiana”, who migrated from Calcutta at the age of 36.
Bechu was indentured to Enmore Estate. His letters to the Daily Chronicle between 1896 to 1901 (he lived in Guyana from 1894 to 1901) consistently denounced the sexual exploitation of Indian women by white overseers, the withdrawal of hospital facilities, the abrogation of the labor code by plantation managers in their abuse of workers’ rights, the collusion between “protectors” of Indians, and the problems facing Indian immigrants in general.
Bechu appeared before the West India Royal Commission on February 1, 1897, the first Indian in the Caribbean to do so. In 1898, and again in 1899, Bechu was charged with libel and threatened with deportation, but was found not guilty.
Another worthy choice is James I. Ramphal (father of Sir Shridath Ramphal). Ramphal, a Presbyterian school teacher is considered a pioneer of secondary education in British Guiana. J.I. Ramphal was formerly a Headmaster at the age of 20 of Helena Canadian Mission School, and later founded (with C.A. Yansen) the Modern High School in Georgetown in 1929.  His writings under the pseudonyms “Akbar Shah” and  “Lala Lajpat” in the early 1930s in a weekly newspaper column argued for a repeal of the obscurantist 1902 Swettenham Circular. The Circular promulgated by Governor Alexander Swettenham did not make education compulsory in the rural areas if a child’s parents objected.
Rather, the Compulsory Educational Ordinance of 1876 stipulated that in Georgetown and New Amsterdam children had to go to school up to the age of 14 but in rural areas they had to go to school up to the age of 12. The Circular allowed Indian parents to bypass the compulsory education ordinance, thereby keeping Indian girls illiterate. J.I. Ramphal’s dream became a reality when the Circular was repealed on July 15, 1933. In 1934, with the withdrawal of the Circular in place, about 988 new Indian girls were attending schools throughout the colony, and the opening of a teacher’s training college in Georgetown in 1926 facilitated the first Indian women graduates in 1935: A.R. Khan, E. Laila and I.V. Salamalay. In August 1936, the Indo-Guyanese intellectual, J.I. Ramphal, reflecting upon the question of a Guyanese identity, while objecting to “sectarianism” and  ”sectionalism”, urged his colleagues to be “Guianese first, Indian later”.
My third choice for name recognition is the Ruhomons: Peter and Joseph. The Ruhomons were born at Plantation Albion. Joseph Ruhomon, born on August 2, 1873, is considered the first Indian intellectual in British Guiana.
Joseph Ruhomon’s pamphlet of December 1894, based on a lecture he delivered in St. Leonard’s School Room in Georgetown on October 4, India and the Progress of Her People at Home and Abroad and How those in British Guiana may Improve Themselves, written at the age of 21, was the first book by an Indian in the British colony, and the Caribbean.
Upon its publication, the conservative Argosy (then a weekly, edited by a Scotsman, James Thompson), challenged the notion that the natives were capable of governing themselves.
The paper argued that neither “a Hindoo or a Negro” had the same scope for advancement and it was premature for them to assume that they were ready for self-government.
Joseph’s brother, Peter Ruhomon, born in 1880, was a journalist. He wrote under the pseudonym “the Pandit” and he was a leading light in the Susamachar [Wesleyan] East Indian Young Men’s Society in the 1920s and 1930s. Peter Ruhomon was an intellectual on his own right and his book the Centenary History of the East Indian in British Guiana (1947), reprinted by the East Indians 150th Anniversary Committee, offer a wealth of information about the progress of Indians in colonial Guiana.
All of these men had deep roots within the Christian faith, and they all wrote under assumed pseudonyms in the local dailies for fear of being persecuted under the hegemonic colonial government. They had a tremendous impact on all Guyanese, particularly Indians, regardless of religion or caste.
Baytoram Ramharack

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