Dear Editor,
Mr Abu Bakr acknowledged my caution of the sterility of polemics in any endeavour to address the challenges confronting our society yet blithely launched one on my supposed activities.(‘The “original identity” is lost for many.’ SN, November 13). It appears that Mr Bakr somehow divined I have been reduced to vetting or censoring letters for the Guyana Times and that I allowed one Sultan Mohamed to misrepresent his (Bakr’s) position on Indians. This is a rather ironic claim from one who has absolutely no grounds for his own absolutely outrageous claim about me.
But even on the substance of his response to Dr Ramharack, Mr Bakr seems to be merely interested in wordplay and not in finding common grounds on which we can all work together. He belaboured the point which ROAR has always made ‒ that one cannot essentialise identity; it is “multilayered”, “situational/contextual”, “transactional” etc, etc.
But one wonders where Mr Bakr really stands on this issue when he has in the past, with great erudition sought to demonstrate that there is, in fact (to Randy Persaud) an “essential” Indian. And what’s more, he/she has a “mindset or set of cultural reflexes” and for Guyana it’s a question “of how the mentality translates into action and specifically, political action.”
But I am also not sure where Mr Bakr gets the notion that anyone wants to return to some “original Indian” identity. He glibly talks about Balram Singh Rai knowing he is “a Kshatriya” to illustrate this claim. But in the same book he cites (by Dr Ramharack) it was clearly stated that Mr Rai was a leading light of the Arya Samaj. This group, Mr Bakr would know, rejected caste-based distinctions and worked assiduously to initiate social reforms in the Hindu section of Indians from the 1930s. Identity is always a work in progress, from within.
But also from without. Mr Bakr studiously avoids the point I made years ago (and again a month or so ago): that one of the most important determinants of identity is the differential distribution of the power relations in the society and how those are applied or perceived to be applied to groups as defined by the power wielders. I refer to what the African American scholar Dyson called the notion of “linked fate”: oppression will be countered along the line of oppression it is applied by the oppressed.
When for instance, I, along with other members of GIFT interviewed “people” who were beaten and violated in George-town on January 12, 1998, they all reported “Indians” were being beaten – because that is what they saw. It did not matter whether they were Hindu, Muslim, Christian, gay, straight, male, female, old, young, what tied their fate together to be beaten was they were seen as “Indians” by their rampaging mob.
Similarly, when African Guyanese saw young men of African origin being shot and killed wantonly in the first decade of this millennium, they too were drawn together as “Africans” due to what they saw as their linked fate. I, Ravi Dev, spoke out against this outrage at the Square of the Revolution but had to explicitly remind the crowd that in the opening drum roll, that Indians also had been killed by another set of oppressors, and they too should have been acknowledged.
What we have proposed more than two decades ago is that in Guyana our dilemmas and our liberation in this land are intertwined. As Guyanese our fates are also linked, but this is masked by the differential treatments of various groups.
Equality in all areas of national life for all by whatever criteria they choose to define themselves is the way to go.
For me, the answer to Mr Bakr’s question, “who is an Indian?” is “whoever calls him/herself an Indian”.
I would urge Mr Bakr not to continue with his word games.
Yours faithfully,
Ravi Dev