More than fifty years have passed with barely a mention of an important moment in Guyanese history. On September 4 1955, the M.V. Resurgent sailed from Georgetown to Calcutta, the last official ship to return ex-indentured labourers from the Caribbean back to India. Return ships often made more than one stop in the colonies before going back to India, but on this last voyage, although Suriname, Trinidad and Jamaica were asked to join the ship, no other government expressed an interest in return. Even for the vast majority who had made Guyana their home, the last return captured the popular imagination. Two thousand people travelled from across the country and gathered in and around Sprostons’ No.1 Wharf and the Dharm Shala in Georgetown to honour those determined to go back.
While the right of return passage was written into indentured contracts, nearly forty years had passed since the end of Indentureship, and six years since the previous ship, the M.V. Orna, had sailed. Consequently, repatriation was discouraged by the BG colonial administration, certain urban Indo-Guyanese professionals, and Pandit Nehru himself, all of whom distanced India from Indo-Caribbeans by advising ex-indentureds to stake their future in the colonies. Notwithstanding official disapproval, these ex-indentureds successfully claimed their contractual right to return to a liberated India.
The reasons for desiring return were as complex and individual as the returnees, and included hope for deliverance from hardships, dreams of Hindi film stardom, or a desire to have one’s ashes scattered in the river Ganges. However, the last Repatriation Officer (my great-uncle, the late Chhablal Ramcharan), attributed the main reason to sentimental longing. Indentureship historian Hugh Tinker suggested that the suspension of the constitution in 1953 contributed to the Resurgent’s voyage. According to Ramcharan’s first-hand account, this was not accurate as most returnees were from villages and estates, not the urban areas affected by political instability. Although Ramcharan’s use of “sentimental” is open to many interpretations including nostalgic desire for the motherland, I prefer to understand “sentimental” as a desire to belong somewhere – to find a way not to be left behind by history.
Based on agitation for return, the colonial government expected at least a thousand people would register to sail, but the Resurgent sailed with only 250 passengers. Forty-four people changed their mind at the last minute, some before and others on the day of departure, with one older man jumping ship just before it sailed – “Nah me bhaaya!” Upon reaching India, many discovered this ‘sentimental’ journey was not quite the home-coming they had anticipated. Confronted with the realities of India, about forty people asked Ramcharan to take them back home – to Guyana. India was home in memory, but not in actuality.
East Indians were not the only ones “going home.” In the mid-1950s, some Afro-Guyanese also attempted to charter a ship, the Coptic, to return to Mother Africa, and some Afro-Trinidadians were also planning a return to Liberia.
Can one ever travel back to find home? This desire is complicated by our history of displacement and forced migration. As I was trying to understand why – after a life built in Guyana and only distant memories of India – a small but strong-minded group so desired to return, the front page of Canada’s national newspaper caught my eye. As if speaking directly to me, the headline asked: “How Canadian are you?” The news of the day reported that both immigrants and their children born in Canada (like me) continue to feel vulnerable to exclusion. Surely, this contributes to the search for home and belonging in places other than where we live. Partly, this is my interest in the M.V. Resurgent.
The question that Alissa Trotz has posed (“What kind of tribe are we?”; January 15, 2007) calls for the input of second-generation “Guyanese out of Guyana.” Existing in a state of hyphenated breaks, “Indo-Guyanese-Canadian” (not necessarily in that order and missing my Trinidadian roots, my mother being Trinidadian) has its drawbacks, like the perpetual sense that I will never simply be Canadian. However, travelling through the connections of these terms I can find my roots and seek continuity with my history.
Canada has only been seen as a multi-racial society for forty years. Guyana and by extension the Caribbean, has been recognized as multi-racial for centuries. Guyana has many lessons to offer, one being reckoning with the inheritance of multiple homelands, not as a threat to “one nation, one people” (although at times it has been misconstrued in this way) but as an acknowledgement of the places where our roots emerged, and also where our homes have become. Sometimes going home is necessary to make peace with the process of change.
