Earning wealth

Growing up in a Hindu home, there was never any doubt about one’s attitude to acquiring wealth. It was right up there as one of the four fundamental “drives” of life – sensuous desires (kaam), material wealth and social status (artha), which were, however, to be pursued within a righteous life (dharma), and if successful would lead to liberation from this cycle of birth and death (moksha).
Apart from the pandit expounding this lesson in various lectures in the Mandir or in any one of the several religious functions that dot the Hindu calendar, it was driven home every day right in the home. The wealth was to be acquired through hard work and nothing was to deter one from this pursuit.
Raised by my maternal grandfather, (Nana) I grew up with the story of his father severely injuring a finger while clearing a rice “bed” (field) which adjoined the railway line. The old man calmly walked up to the metal rail, placed his injured finger on it, lopped off the hanging extremity, bandaged the stub and went back to work.
My grandfather was born in 1896 and was over sixty when I went to live with him at the age of six. He was at the tail end of his job on the sugar plantation, working as a shovel man. He was proud of his “false” name “Steelrod”, earned from his reputation of never backing down in the cane fields even though he was not the biggest man around. He was proud too of being a Kurmi, an agricultural caste. I never knew him not to be at work – either in his home garden or on the land his father had acquired in lieu of his return trip to India. Even though in middle age he had acquired a “timber grant” and operated a “saw pit”, he returned to farming. He built his “high house” in the 1930s, long before Bookers established their housing schemes, and much of the lumber came from his saw pit.
I am amused at the hullabaloo being made nowadays about “child labour”. The philosophy I imbibed was when it came to the family earning its way to whatever lifestyle it aspired; it was a matter of every man-jack putting their shoulders to the wheel. And “man jack” included women and children. I was famous for inventing schemes to avoid manual labour, but as I became an adult, I discovered the latent impressions had sunken deeply and I too was driven to work. In whatever field one found oneself.
My grandfather and his peers might have been forced to work on the plantation and sell their labour, but their dream was always to work for themselves. When the Indians made their move from the cane and rice fields to the professions and business, most assumed it was to acquire status in the wider society. But it had as much to do with being independent.
I’ve also heard a lot about the “risks” one undertakes to establish a business. Perhaps naÏvely, it was felt that hard work would overcome any barrier to success in any endeavour. But it worked. All the businesses in my village (mostly retail outlets of one sort or another) had been established by individuals who had no prior experience or caste history. When I was in New York (from 1972) and observed the Indo-Guyanese community establish itself in Richmond Hill by the late ‘70’s (an aunt of mine was one of the early ones to move there in 1977) again most of the new businesses owners had no prior experience. Just the desire to earn an independent living through hard work – and of course to acquire wealth and status.
But the end of earning wealth and status was only one side of the coin of “artha”. The other side was how to use them: one, first of all had the responsibility to improve the lot of one’s family and then that of the wider society, in ever widening circles. The ideal was that the best son was given to “dharma” to serve and work for its spread. This, however, was one aspect of the Hindu view of life that has been profoundly altered by the total institution of the plantation system as indentured labourers passed through it.
The sundering of the immigrants from their close-knit village and caste bonds and the implicit prohibition of the extended family through the logee-lodging for single-families, steered the immigrant to focus on individual success. This process has been exacerbated in the subsequent years as the immigrants entered a society in which this orientation was the ideal.
Today, the neo-liberal ethos that has become hegemonic encourages the focus on individual success at the expense of the group and transmuted the urge for wealth and status into greed and power. We have to work to return to the centre.