India’s new president and Guyana

Jul 25, 2022 Letters

Dear Editor,

Today, Droupadi Murmu was installed as President of India. While in their parliamentary democracy, the presidency is seen as “symbolic”, that symbolism projects the identity of who ‘represents’ the nation. And it is here that Murmu’s election is historic because her identity is “tribal”.
In India, there are 705 groups with distinct cultures, recognised as “Scheduled Tribes” (ST) or “Adivasis”, literally meaning “Indigenous Peoples”. At approximately 104 million, they comprise 8.6% of India’s population but are quite fragmented. In the Ramcharitmanas, composed around 1574 by Tulsidas from the much earlier Ramayan of Valmiki, which was brought to Guyana by the Indentured Labourers (Girmitiyas), there is an interesting anecdote that comments on the status of Tribals at that time. An elderly female Tribal devotee of Sri Ram, Sabari, tells him, “In every society, women are the lowest strata; and as a tribal woman, I am the lowest of the low.” Unfortunately, not much has changed since then for the Tribals.

Murmu is a member of the Murmu clan of the Santhal tribe – the largest in India with at least 10 million members and concentrated in Jharkhand (formerly part of Bihar), Odisha and West Bengal. The Santhals have a direct connection with the Indians who were shipped out as Indentured Labourers during the colonial era, starting with Mauritius in 1834 and then British Guiana in 1938. In both cases, they were among the first batches and dubbed as “Dhangars”, or “Hill Coolies”. In fact, they could have been drawn from any one or combination of the three major tribes who lived in the forested Chhota Nagpur plateau – Santhal, Munda or Oaroan. But who distinguishes among the “lowest of the low”?
In the case of Guyana, in the 1st shipment on the Whitby and Hesperus, there were 150 Tribals among the 414 shipped out.

Eventually, only 90 overall chose to remain after their indentureship ended in 1843. But up to the 1860s, after shipments resumed sputteringly between 1845 and 1851, many others would have been brought to Guyana. From the 1860’s recruitment shipment shifted westwards into Bihar and UP. The Santhals, as Indigenous Peoples, try to live in harmony with their forests and express reverence for nature by paying obeisance at Jaher (sacred groves). They practised intensive wet cultivation of rice and some historians have stated it was “Hill Coolies” who cultivated the first large acreage of rice (16 acres) in Guyana by Girmitiyas at Edinburg, WCD. The Leonora Secondary School is presently located on this land, next to the National Track and Field Stadium.
We are told that up to the 1860s, many recruits were picked up in the “bazaars and markets” of Calcutta. These would mostly have been the tribals of Chota Nagpur, who continued to be driven out from their forest habitation since the British draconian “Permanent Settlement” imposition of 1793. Two years before the 1857 “Indian Rebellion” against the East India Company, there was the “Santal Rebellion”, with just as ferocious a reaction accelerating their expulsion, which continues to the present; now pushed by mining interests.

After the 1860s, the Tribals preferred indentureship to the Assam Tea Plantations, from where they could more easily return to their homes. Among the Tribals, Santhals have since become most educated and President Murmu comes from that strata. She graduated from college (1979); worked in the Government of Odissa service; then taught in the education system; elected to District Council (1997), Minister of State (2002); Member of Local Assembly (MLA) (2004) and in 2015, Governor. Tomorrow in 2022, she becomes President of India.
But Murmu’s ascension to this high office, in which she succeeded Ram Nath Kovind (the second Dalit or “outcaste” President) raises the issue of whether entrenched inequalities in Indian society are moving beyond symbolism. This entrenchment was codified and made procrustean by the British by enforcing their painstaking group classifications (like caste and tribals and coolies) in India and their colonies through their full panoply of force. The “Hill Coolies, as Gillanders & Arbuthnot informed John Gladstone on his 1836 enquiry about shipping some of them to British Guiana, “…have no religion, no education, and, in their present state, no wants beyond eating, drinking and sleeping.”
Will they continue to be just fungible “Dhangars” notwithstanding Murmu? Will Indians continue to be called “Coolies” in Guyana?

Sincerely,
Ravi Dev

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India’s new president and Guyana

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