Dear Editor,
The Indian narrative, and particularly, Indian history, should not be indentured to any institution or political party. That includes the PPP, although historically the PPP has outperformed all political parties when it comes to addressing Indian concerns. The recent commissioned publication of Janet Jagan: Freedom Fighter of Guyana by Patricia Mohammed, which seeks to establish an official biography of the PPP matriarch, audaciously highlights Janet Jagan’s indifference towards her largely loyal Indian supporters.
No one will deny that Janet Jagan (1920 – 2009) made significant contribution to our country’s development, a pathway inextricably linked to a partnership with her charismatic Indian husband. However, her political contribution, perhaps underestimated, is grossly overstated and overplayed. Outside of the political world, her most significant contributions remain visible in the creole artistic and literary fields, but with a perfunctory interest in Indian culture.
Janet provided material and public support for the School of Guyana Ballet, Castellani House as a National Gallery, the Walter Roth Museum of Anthropology and the Museum of African Heritage. Many Guyanese may be unaware that she catapulted Martin Wylde Carter (1927 – 1997) into the national spotlight by giving exposure to his poems of resistance in the PPP’s organ, Thunder, which she edited. To her credit, the late Rooplall Monar told me that Janet had provided exposure to some of his work, but it was Jeremy Poynting who gave Monar his opportune break by publishing his short stories in Backdam People. The spectrum of Janet’s cultural interests was widespread, yet preservation of the indentured Indian records or initiating plans to establish an Indian Museum were not in her vision.
Not only was Janet Jagan unaware of Indian history and its diverse culture when she arrived in British Guiana in 1943, but the same holds true for much of her 66-year political career. It was the innocence and naivete of Indian generosity, ignorance too, which accorded her the status of the “blue-eyed bowgie of Guyana,” the title of a chapter in Mohammed’s book.
It is intellectually challenging to situate analyses in Janet Jagan’s narrative that offer any credible prescription for Guyana’s enduring racial/ethnic problem. To the best of my recollection, her very first, perhaps only letter to the press as President, was in response to my reminder that she participated in the rigging of the 1962 election for PPP Party Chairman against Balram Singh Rai in favour of Brindley Benn, an intervention engineered to project the multiethnic character of the PPP leadership (4/8/99). As Minister of Home Affairs in 1964, Janet Jagan opted for the easy way out – resignation at a time when the country was mired in racial strife. Terrible acts, which she categorized as “genocide” in her resignation letter of June 1, 1964, were perpetrated against her Indian supporters in the isolated villages of Wismar and Christianburg. Senator Ann Jardim, later to become a business professor at Harvard University, described Janet’s short-lived role as Home Affairs Minister as one of “incompetence and ineffectiveness.”
Vanda Radzik, as recorded in Mohammed’s book, described a disturbing incident marking the commemoration of Walter Rodney’s literary contributions at Hotel Tower in June 2000, at which Janet Jagan was present: “I remember when we launched Walter Rodney’s children’s series book, Lakshmi out of India, a Swami got up and disagreed about how Walter portrayed little Indian girls, and he was saying that it was not true that little Indian girls who were indentured had any problems and were suffering from drought in India and trying to dismiss Walter Rodney’s characterization of the young woman Laxmi. Janet got up and rose to her feet and she put Swami in his place. She quoted this and that and she defended Walter Rodney’s portrayal, and she defended Walter Rodney himself who was never disingenuous and knew his history – she was just fantastic.”
Radzik was referring to Swami Aksharananda, the principal of Saraswati Vidya Niketan, a nationally recognized school of academic excellence on West Coast Demerara. Like Radzik, Aksharananda (formerly Dr. Odaipaul Singh), was an admirer of Walter and once a fellow WPA supporter. Rodney, who was “never known to entertain the idea of a value-free and neutral scholarship” adopted a “classic orientalist construction of India,” thereby incorporating into his narrative some widely held misconceptions of the Indian experience. Aksharananda merely sought to identify the common stereotypes of Indians embedded in Rodney’s narrative on Lakshmi. To Radzik’s gratification, Janet delivered a well-deserved “tongue lashing”!
Janet deliberately thwarted demands to establish a commission to investigate the racial attacks against Indians on January 12, 1998, which occurred during her presidential tenure. It is doubtful Cheddi Jagan would have surrendered to such indifference. Even after a report of the racially targeted attacks was documented, compiled and publicly launched by GIFT, her government refused to acknowledge its existence.
Janet’s misunderstanding of Guyanese history is most glaringly revealed in the violence that came on the heels of the 1997 presidential election. She failed to comprehend the reaction of descendants of enslaved African people, who, 235 years after Governor Kofi Akan led a rebellion against the European plantocracy, were motivated by a historical memory that fueled derision for a white woman as head of state, long after Massa gone. Her admission to David Dabydeen that Guyanese “do not see white when they look at me” is stupefying, and points to the superficial and illusory alien world she inhabited. Janet Jagan was certainly no revolutionary who stormed the stone gates of Bastille Saint-Antoine on behalf of her supporters, except in the minds of a misguided few who may now wish to caricature her as the “mother of the nation.”
We live in a global village today where Guyanese in the diaspora far outnumber Guyanese at home, with the majority domiciled in the United States. A naturalized Guyanese could never become President in Janet Jagan’s country of birth, but an American could do so in ours. It is ironic when one considers that many who left Guyana did so when Janet Jagan was a prominent leader of an ineffective opposition that rented critical support to the dictatorship, in exchange for the promise of a “scientific” socialist revolution (she predicted the collapse of the US!). The cultural ennoblement and political experimentation associated with Janet Jagan’s legacy in Guyana leaves us with another reality: any well-meaning Guyanese in the diaspora, particularly those who work to positively strengthen our fragile democracy (as opposed to the naysayers and instigators), have earned a legitimate right to influence the shape of a future Guyana. It would be grossly hypocritical for anyone associated with Janet Jagan to declare otherwise.
Sincerely,
Baytoram Ramharack