Dear Editor,
I refer to a letter wherein Mr. Rampersaud is fiercely demanding that the name ‘Indian Arrival Day’ be dropped because that anniversary celebrates the time when Indian indentures were brought to Guyana in a state of neo-slavery. Rampersaud falls into the error of believing that the Indian Arrival Day anniversary on 5th May was a celebration. It is nothing of the kind, it is a day of commemoration. Thanksgiving Day in the USA and Holocaust Day among Jewish communities are similar to Indian Arrival Day. People remember bad experiences “lest we forget”. Rampersaud should now be comfortable with Indian Arrival Day.
The indentureship contracts were not made in Guyana; they were made in India before the girmitiyas left and were basically fair for Victorian times. The neo-slavery and oppression of Indian indentures occurred because the Planter Class, in collusion with the Colonial Government, dishonoured and disregarded the contracts when they arrived in the colony. A third misunderstanding and mistake Rampersaud makes is when he writes “the Indians who arrived here were illiterate”.
Indians brought their religious books, such as the Bhagwat Gita, the Ramayana and the Quran and other books, and it was because their culture was a written one it survived unlike African cultures which were oral. Rampersaud probably meant that the indentures were not literate in English, though there were a few like Bechu, who even wrote letters to the newspapers.
Sincerely,
Paul Validum Ramlochan
