Considerable amount of historical amnesia has to go into making ‘poor rural Indian’ seem incapable of protecting interests

Dear Editor,

It took me a while to wrap my head around this one. For several minutes my imaginative map was a complete disconnect, unhinged from its normal moorings, trapped, it seems, between what I was reading in a contemporary text of the present and the disconcerting imagery it provoked. It appeared, if anything, cognitively incongruous … “it is the very poor rural Indian Guyanese who continue to practice their religion and culture, remembered from Mother India, who most need to be protected and defended”. What? This has to be a report from the London-based Anti-Slavery Society of recent arrivals (1838) from India or the emerging nationalist press in India objecting to their countrymen being hauled off and deployed as cheap labour in the far flung outposts of Empire.

That, it turned out, was not the case. This was the conclusion of a letter from Ms. Ryhaan Shah (18th March, 2017) who took umbrage at one of Allan Fenty’s columns (17th March, 2017) where he apparently quipped about Indian “economic triumphalism” and those bound to “Mother India” after a “cuss up” at the National Cultural Centre.

What is curious are the assumptions of Ms. Shah’s comment. She appears convinced that there are not only “the very poor rural Indian Guyanese who continue to practice their religion and culture, remembered from Mother India” but they also “need to be protected and defended” from some unnamed ogre ready to pounce and devour. It is not known where or who these “rural Indians” are or the specific social attributes that elicit/occasion the need for protection and defence. What happened to agency if after more than five decades of independence we (rural Indians) still need the speech and voice of the urban, educated, postmodern professional to protect and defend … ? What kind of remembering occurs “from “Mother India” after the loss of language and physical disconnect for more than 100 years? What/Which “Mother India” is culled here to provide backdrop, cultural continuity, ideological connection and a fictive homogeneity, when the very enunciation (culture, rural vs urban, and class, very poor rural Indian) undermines any such claim? The Indian, it appears and contrary to what we are asked to believe, is no longer singular and univocal trapped inside origin and DNA.

There is not a little deja vu here. While some of the characters may have changed the story is familiar and remains essentially the same. Some years ago, 30th December, 1998, a letter from a group of us from the Upper Corentyne appeared in Stabroek News. In the letter we drew attention to a controversy that emerged over a locally-produced TV programme “Agree to Disagree” written and produced by local Indo-Guyanese entrepreneur Richarde Mahase. The programme consisted of two characters performed by an African (Franklin) and an East Indian (Puddock). One of the key elements in the “sit com” is staged around the character of Puddock who is portrayed, in mock reflection of the rural East Indian, in stereotypic, exaggerated speech and outlandish mannerisms.

Some were not happy with the programme and wrote complaining of it. It soon became clear that disapproval of the programme was encouraged and driven by an East Indian organization, Guyana Indian Foundation Trust (GIFT) established in June of 1997. The aim of GIFT, in a two-page ad at the time, was to protect the rights of East Indians since it seemed that the “nationalist” PPP, in office since 1992, appeared both unable and unwilling to do so.

Others were not so inclined and complained that GIFT’s disapproval of the programme bordered on “censorship and repression” since it had to do with opinion and “speech”, debatable and ambiguous at best.  These were quickly dismissed as ill-advised and just as easily ignored.

According to our reading “The substance of GIFT’s argument is that one of the main characters in the programme, Puddock, ‘is portrayed as weak, an imbecile with his outlandish manner of speech and actions, done in mock exaggeration of the rural Guyanese Indian’”. Moreover, the imagery that the description produces reinforces an old stereotype that is at once “insensitive, callous and exploitative”. And it is this “representation of ‘the’ rural Indian that is internalized and becomes the basis of self-hate and the point of reference for others”.

Not so, we suggested. There is a long tradition of rural practice in which “The outlandish, the outrageous, and the exaggerated are the natural conditions of being through which rural Indians have been able to maintain autonomy, integrity and self-hood”. It was a constant safeguard against the urban “boss man” infront of her as she tried to hold on to her dignity while recognizing the presence of an overbearing urban authority. The genre has long acquired popular significance and literary presence in the work of Rabelais or a Cervantes – rural folk tilting at windmills. Literary critic, Bakhtin, sees it as the very essence of life faced with the overwhelming presence of “civility” that can only be negotiated by and through self-abnegation, exaggeration and hyperbole.

But the real story here may very well be the embarrassment of the educated, sophisticated urban Indian ashamed of a history and a past that he/she would prefer to forget. There is a seeming fear of a common history with their rural kin folk that connects them to a past that is still contaminated with the uncivility and    barbarism of rural life – Marx would say “idiocy”. And, in the circumstances where we must accept the connection as both proverbial and necessary, we must also find the means and the moment of difference to separate, exclude and name. The DNA and Mother India, origins and connection, seem to lose their stability and solidity in the face of difference.

There is not a little disappointment here that after more than fifty years of debate about modernization and development we continue with this troll. Most critics generally agree that the problem with colonial capitalism was the manner in which first world corporations and imperial policy sucked the life blood out of most of the global south by first reorganizing the economies into market principles and then instituting an urban/rural divide in which it was organized and conducted. A significant body of this literature drew attention to “How Europe Underdeveloped Africa” (Rodney) and immerserized the south, transforming it into dependent appendages while others (Myrdal and Lipton) alerted us to the urban/rural divide that attended the process. It was also in the latter that others (Robinson, Said) found the moment of collaboration between imperialism and its native “informants”.

There is not little irony here since it was the urban, educated elite that was the source of that collaboration and continued affiliation, with both language and other refinements of civility (as in the civilizing mission) to do so – effectively and efficiently, we may add. The name for it may have changed but the imagery, coined by Fanon, are still with us – the national colonial bourgeoisie trapped in the despair of its own fear and uncertainty takes its stand and not for the first or last time delivers it in the language of class and communal disavowal – “I am not one of them”.

A considerable amount of historical amnesia has to go in the making of such a historiography where the “poor rural Indian” is seen as stupid, ignorant and docile incapable of either understanding or protecting her interests, requiring, the steady hand of her urban educated better for protection and defence. How is this telling of Indian history possible in the face of the historical evidence of Indian resistance in the plantations and estates well into the 20th century requires some considerable “covering” of the “rural Indian” as in Said’s poignant expression of another occasion: “covering Islam”. Its presence, i.e. resistance, was so overwhelming and forceful that “Enmore” became the inspiration for Jagan and the historic PPP. Maybe Ms. Shah has not seen the evidence or if she has she will have to explain the Swami’s success with a school for Indian children in rural Guyana as the exception that proves the rule or an apparition of unknown origin. Moreover, it took an African (Rodney) to show how even with the panoptic gaze of sardars, supervisors and drivers under conditions of plantation labour the systemic opposition and resistance to the oppressive condition of indentureship was not lost on the rural boundyard coolie.

Finally, the debate about the meaning of the Indian was a matter of some considerable concern  during the 2015 elections in Guyana. The East Indian Prime Ministerial candidate for the African-led opposition APNU-AFC coalition was taken to task for setting aside his ethnic/racial self for nationality when he announced he was Guyanese first and then anything else later. Expectedly, it issued in the code word for the insurrectionary drama of Guyanese politics, up front and in your face: race. Soon the East Indian literati, diaspora and all, was out in full force ensuring that all and sundry were informed that by disavowing his Indianess for his nationality he was also disavowing his “essential being” (biology is destiny) and could not, therefore, be trusted with Indian interests. Ms Shah, it will be remembered, was at the front and centre of this.

Are we now to understand from Ms Shah’s latest pronouncement that such may no longer be the case? The two statements appear contradictory and incommensurate. First, identity is fixed through origin and connection, India and DNA, biology is destiny. Second, by claiming that there is an urban, rural divide imbricated with rich and poor then identity cannot be fixed around the old sentiments of origin and connection. Biology can longer be destiny. The new circumstances allow us to say that identity is not fixed but open to socialised influences differentiated by both culture (urban/rural) and class (rich and poor).

Yours faithfully,

Rishee Thakur