Dear Editor,
A letter from Dr Baytoram Ramharack responds to my comments on his initial contribution decrying the paucity of Indian intellectuals articulating that group’s “dilemma” and asserting its “identity” (‘Indian intellectuals should advocate for an equal space in national dialogue which does not evoke charges of racism’ SN, November 3).
Even upon close re-reading one fails to find in it any definition of the “intellectuals” he sees as lacking, but one assumes what he means is the “public intellectual” who connects scholarly traditions with social activism. And there is a similar elusiveness with reference to the idea of “identity.”
In a note to his letter carried in the online comments section, Keith Williams remarks that Indian culture has been catered to and conferred official recognition through the grant of holidays and inclusion in the national life in many ways, and that Indian owned companies control the media in this country and can so set the tone of the frequency and depth of that self-portrayal the group requires. In another note Dave Martins wrote, as I understand it, that the past twenty-three years, (which I believe added political control to the perceived dominance in other spheres), was an opportunity that proves only that the question is beyond that of physical, financial or political preponderance. I would say it is a question of a programme that emerges from the dynamics of a reality of cultural evolution on all sides. The Indian identity is not essential and unchanging. And the character and responses of their co-citizens is also in perpetual mutation. While a political prominence would be a factor in the group’s self-perception and its reactivity in relation to other racial groups, in the end it changes nothing if all Indians are expected to call for is “balancing the armed forces” or repeating the refrains from the fifties and sixties with no examination of the legal and other systems in which we live.
On the question of identity we need illumination. One is reminded that identity is multiple. There is what we really, objectively are. But in addition there is what others think we are, what we want and aspire to be, and what our public profile is in terms of a legal or other administrative/political conception of ourselves. And so on.
That Indian, Hindu or Muslim, is in fact a subordinate in cultural terms is beyond dispute if he is considered as being essentially different from the way in which our laws conceive of him as a citizen. There is a conception of ‘Guyanese’ in our system that ignores the cultural specificities and traditions of all sub-groups. The Indian traditions and faiths have none but a ceremonial role in the running of things. They are, in public life, often reduced to spectacle and gestures that, on public occasions, concedes his existence. Nothing more. But then so are all groups subject to the codes and regimes we have inherited to govern both the social and personal spheres. It is an area to which rarely Indians or Africans have sought correction.
I have written here several times that, as a Muslim, a religion I share with many Indo-Guyanese, it is unthinkable that divorce laws or inheritance rules, or prayer in schools perpetuate the blind colonial era dominance of the Anglican, as perpetuated by the African-Creoles who would both carry and rebel in their own fashion against, the coloniser’s culture.
It is therefore insufficient for Dr Ramharack and others to be wailing about the exclusion of their culture when they themselves have limited their militancy to an ‘Indian Arrival Day’ and ‘national holiday’ acknowledgement. The calls for recognition mirror in this way, the limitations one often found in the Afro-Caribbean camp. Apart from extremists such as in Trinidad and elsewhere re-changing their names or even refusing to wear clothing or retreating to the Adamic existence of ‘The Hills’, the practical exigencies of inhabiting a modern world impose themselves, given our geographical and cultural proximity to centres of power of an enormous puissance. All formal education is within the linguistic and epistemiological range of these cultures. What we are allowed to retain, is religious or folkloric. What we strive to reproduce is the anthropological particularities (marriage customs, family structure) of the ancestors and some values. Rapidly evaporating under the white heat of the media and the schooling we receive. This hegemony that affects everyone is one thing.
Another is the natural tendency of people living together to exchange, share, adopt and adapt. Slowly we become ‘one people’. Hence, all over the world, in all times in history, people sharing the same geographical and linguistic space become and are perceived as ‘a nation’, a culture, a ‘people’, despite the differences they see and fight over. So Dr Ramharack and the Indian intellectuals are fighting a losing battle against a natural force.
Dr Ramharack let it be known that for him the ROAR blueprint represents a national agenda. It is, beyond its analytic side and diagnostics, a document written at a certain moment in the group’s history and one I know of solely for its call for federalism. The Bantustanisation of the Republic it proposes would see an exacerbation of differences and isolation. The Muslim Indians would have to be given a separate space from the Hindus sensitive to cow slaughter. It would start a process that would, with minorities proliferating about us, lead to spaces according to the mixtures in their origins, I suppose.
Dr Ramharack, like the others, needs to move beyond a self-pity that reveals itself instrumentalised for political ends, and give Indians in Guyana their due. They are far from being the suppressed failures portrayed. The versification of perceived insult and offence that led to some Indian intellectuals brandishing the despised “douglarisation” and “kick down the door” as the only manner of interaction between two peoples, is not only the exaggeration of a falsity, it ignores the supportive role of generations of Afro-Guyanese nurses, teachers, policemen and artisans who worked with Indian communities and individuals to bring us to where we are. Each race here needs to develop a discourse that acknowledges the positive contribution of the other races. As a first post- independence government sought to do. A letter is now due from Dr Baytoram on the dangers of culturally programmed ingratitude and from ROAR refining further its apartheid idea.
Yours faithfully,
Abu Bakr
