The Indo-Guyanese Arrival Day-Labour Day tie-in

May 06, 2018 News

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By Dennis Nichols

There is a fortuitous tie-in between the observance of last week’s two national holidays that should not go unnoticed by Guyanese. With Labour Day’s focus on workers, their welfare, and rights, it’s a small step to cement its link to Arrival Day which predated recognition of the former by several decades, and initiated the ‘laborious’ contribution of our East Indian population to this country’s development.
No sane or sentient Guyanese should question the truth of this observation, notwithstanding the enormous part played by enslaved Africans and later by other indentured immigrants and their descendants in our continuum of growth over the past 400 years.
Labour Day evokes the spirit of the late Hubert Nathaniel Critchlow and his struggles on workers’ behalf. Part of that struggle was the advocacy for universal adult suffrage (UAS) – the right of every adult to vote, that was taken up with great tenacity by the forerunner to the People’s Progressive Party – the Political Affairs Committee (PAC), led by a descendant of Indian indentured immigrants, Cheddi Jagan and his wife Janet.
As a result, UAS was recommended in 1951, a huge victory for the working class in this country, leading to the first elections in British Guiana under this banner in 1953. That’s one aspect of the tie-in.
My friend and sister in journalism, Indranie Deolall, who worked with me at The Chronicle Newspaper in the nineteen-eighties, has recently been reviewing and revisiting the times and lives of her ancestors from India, across the dark waters to British Guiana ever since the Whitby and Hesperus set their sails for that fateful journey 180 years ago.
Her sketches are illuminating; creative in expression and rich in detail. From them, I began to understand more feelingly the treachery of deception in luring both the unsuspecting and the enterprising to a land so similar in climate to theirs and yet so sinister in the exploitative nature of the ‘manipulator-‘maninja’-massa’ hierarchy they had to confront. I learnt how disease and death stalked them and thwarted their early ambitions.
But I also learnt of their industry, courage, and resilience in adjusting to the daily grind on the sugar plantations, their efforts to continually express and defend traditions, and a culture that was not only preserved, but eventually interwoven into a nascent Guyanese ethos – still emerging I would say from its colonial cocoon. Thanks Indranie for the ongoing education.
And there were others; my mother had a short but entertaining lexicon of words and gestures snagged from her East Indian friends and cohorts in the village of Mahaicony, (where I was born) and Highdam, where I spent my early childhood. Decades after her death, I would still find myself saying to my children “Paisah na deh” (No money) or “Today is murgee with nuff surwa”. (Chicken with gravy) If my spelling or translation is off, blame my mother. Then there is Reuben Lachmansingh’s novel ‘A dip at The Sangam’.
The author is a nephew of the late J.P. Lachmansingh. (Trade unionist, politician, teacher) I do not think I ever met him, but I knew two of his brothers who operated drug stores on Camp Street, not far from where my family lived in the late nineteen-fifties and early ’sixties; the name Lachmansingh being then synonymous with that particular enterprise.
His book, like Indranie’s articles, tell the story of the East Indian uprooted from his land through trickery and transplanted onto foreign soil. Its timescape is broad, tracing the life of one Raja from his home in the village of Belwasa in India’s Bihar state to his ownership of lands and relative wealth in Demerara.
It deals with similar themes of treachery, deception, and resistance, to which is added the pain of separation from a wife and a community rich with the promise of success for the protagonist. Elements of anger, resentment, and resignation are added, but it is eventually Raja’s humanity, shrewdness, and industry that underscore his rise to prominence in the bitter-sweet battleground of plantation life and social interaction. In the end, he reverses his journey and returns to his native village where, according to the author, he has to decide if he will ‘find solace in the Old World or the New’.
As I read that book last year, snippets of memory surfaced from my childhood at Highdam, which were later to blend into a general appreciation of things Indian, despite a lack of their true significance. I had several, but not many, East Indian friends, among whom members of the fairer sex were more prominent.
In an atmosphere of mostly physical attraction, culture and history were never a big deal; there were always more superficial things to talk about. It was not until I became a journalist in the mid-to-late eighties that I began to more genuinely appreciate ethnic nuances, and what I called East-Indianness. Researching material, interviewing persons of widely-different backgrounds, and writing for a multi-ethnic readership will do that for you.
Getting to know Indranie as a fellow reporter and Raschid Osman as an editor (both at The Chronicle) or Rovin Deodat as ‘The Voice’ on the Guyana Broadcasting Corporation, or Laxhmie Kallicharran as a fount of knowledge on Indian culture, was a mind-expanding experience, partly because I hadn’t hitherto known many East Indian professionals with a literary bent, and partly because their interests were so cosmopolitan in scope.
Covering Indian shows and religious events, and seeing my friend Philip McClintock execute his Kathak dance steps at the Cultural Centre did the same for my relatively closed mind where those expressions were concerned. And I had at one time felt that eating and enjoying puri, pholourie, dhal, and bhunjal curry chicken was enough to boast of my appreciation of things Indian!
Now all of this is coming from someone who had been hearing sporadically that most East Indians were cunning, money-grabbing cut-throats to whom life was cheap and suicide a valid option to end it. Those who became wealthy, well-educated, or successful in whatever enterprise they attempted, were said to do so by devious means.
Words to that effect were thrown at them in spicy Guyanese vernacular, and to be honest, many of them also threw similarly derogatory barbs at other races, especially Afro-Guyanese. I heard them all. It’s a good thing I never heard them from my parents or siblings, and that I learnt to be a skeptical and independent thinker, even though at the back of my mind a voice whispered that some of what each race said about the other was probably true. Just traverse the length and breadth of Guyana, or watch and read the local news.
The East Indian experience in Guyana, over the 180 years since Whitby and Hesperus, isn’t something I can easily relate to, even as a socially-conscious individual; there was so much else going on. In my childhood the racial and political upheaval of the early ‘sixties confused me. In my mid-to-late teens, the Black Power Movement and socialism as an adjunct ensnared me. Then I was hooked on partying; then came jobs, marriage, children, and ‘life’.
Over the years, I found it difficult to distill any truths about race and race relations from the muddle of information and experiences that surrounded me. Maybe, I concluded, it’s less about truth and more about perception. That I can relate to.
The perception of Indo-Guyanese in terms of ethnicity alone is a mixed bag into which I am still hesitant to plunge. As Guyanese though, our East Indian brothers and sisters have had their names, exploits, and achievements etched into our country’s history, be it in agriculture, business, law, politics, the civil service, or simply as ordinary salt-of-the-earth individuals. That’s the ‘labour’ we can all obviously relate to and understand, and of course they reinforce the nexus between the two recently-observed national holidays I referred to in the first paragraph. Perception may be closer to truth than we think.

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