Historian Professor Tota Mangar is set to travel to New Delhi today for a conference at the invitation of the India International Centre (IIC).
At the conference, Mangar will present a paper on the India-Guyana relationship.
A release yesterday from the Indian High Commission said that the theme of the conference is “Connected Histories, Shared Pre-sent: Cross-Cultural Experiences between Latin America, the Caribbean, and India”.
The release noted that Mangar has published many articles on indentureship, including “An experiment in East Indian Land Settlement Scheme in Transition: 175 years of East Indian Arrival in Guyana”.
Mangar’s paper is entitled: “Guyana-India relations 1838 to the present time: The ties that bind and solidify”. The conference would also be attended by renowned academicians and historians from the Latin American and Caribbean region.
The release said that India and the Latin American & the Caribbean region have a long history of interaction which dates back to precolonial and colonial times when the Pacific was an active arena of trade.
“The economic enterprise of indentured labour that resulted in the huge Indian diaspora in the Caribbean after the abolition of slavery is certainly the most dramatic episode of this history. Since the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century, significant intellectual and cultural contacts were established between the two regions. This included Rabindranath Tagore’s stay in Argentina in 1924; the Indian Humanist MN Roy cofounding the Mexican Communist Party, and Mexican José Vasconcelos turn to Indian spiritualism as an integral part of conceiving a new education policy for his country. Gandhian thought and his legacy of non-violence continue to reverberate in today’s Latin America and the Caribbean. Closer to our times, Octavio Paz’s poems and essays on India, and Gabriel García Marquez’s magical realist literary techniques, and subaltern women’s testimonies from Central America became popular in India”, the release added.
Mangar met yesterday with the High Commissioner of India, Dr. K. J. Srinivasa. The release said that the High Commissioner briefed him about the administrative and logistic arrangements at IIC and engaged him on the importance of this conference for the Caribbean and Latin American region not only academically but also for contemporary relationships between India and the region.
Dr Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, Minister of External Affairs is to deliver the valedictory speech at the conference.
