Harry Hergash, a graduate of the University

of Guyana, taught at the Annandale Government Secondary from 1964 to 1969.

He immigrated to Canada in 1974.

Indian-Guyanese, the descendants of Indian immigrants, comprise about 43.5% of the population of Guyana. The everyday speech of the majority of this segment of the population, especially those living in rural communities, is peppered with words of Indic origin. Most of these words relate to items of food, kitchen utensils, terminology identifying family members and other relatives, names and terminology associated with religious holidays and worship, and names of vegetables and plants.

On a daily basis, it would not be uncommon to hear a woman speaking of using a belna (rolling pin) to baylay (roll and spread) roti (Indian flat-bread) or hear at lunch-time that daal (a soup-like dish of split peas/lentils), rice, and bhoonjal chicken (a form of curried chicken with no gravy) are on the menu. A child, on seeing his/her paternal grandparents is likely to greet them as aajee (grandmother) and aajaa (grandfather), or naanee (grandmother) and naana (grandfather), if they are maternal grandparents. A farmer may report that he is going to his garden to plant bora (string beans), bygan (egg plant/boulanger), karaila (bitter melon) or bhaajee (any leafy vegetable such as spinach). At certain times during the year, one may hear of a national holiday granted for Diwaali (Hindu festival of lights) or a national holiday for Eid (Muslim celebration at the end of the month of fasting).

These Indic and to a lesser extent Arabic/Persian words were brought to Guyana by the ancestors of Indian-Guyanese who were taken to the then British colony, to work as Indentured labourers on the sugar plantations. Over the years, some of these words have migrated into the wider Guyanese community. However, with each passing generation of Indian-Guyanese, the repository is being depleted. Increasingly less and less words are being passed on. This article offers a brief look at the sources of the words and phrases that were brought by the Indian immigrants and passed on to their descendants.

The Indian immigrants were recruited from different districts in north and south India, with the majority coming from the north. In the north, the main recruiting districts were the North Western Provinces and Oudh or the United Provinces (Uttar Pradesh), Bengal, Bihar and, to a lesser extent, the Punjab. In the south, the main areas were the Tamil and the Telinga districts of the Madras Presidency. After 1858, the Bhojpuri-speaking districts of western Bihar and eastern Uttar Pradesh were the main suppliers of indentured labourers and altogether, Bihar and UP accounted for roughly 86% of the recruits to Guyana.

Surendra Kumar Gambhir, in his doctoral dissertation for the University of Pennsylvania in 1981 provides a listing of the dialects of the Indian indentured immigrants to Guyana. He states that the lingua franca of the first immigrants from India to Guyana was a form of Bhojpuri. He mentions that during the period 1842-1871, more than 73% of the immigrants came from areas where the languages spoken were Maithili, Magahi, Bhojpuri, Avadhi and several western dialects. For the period 1875-1916, he notes that a large number of speakers of Bhojpuri, Avadhi, Maithili, Magahi, Kannauji, Braj, Bundel, and Khari Boli (Old Hindi) came to Guyana. In the last period, he observed that 8.3% of the immigrants came from various parts like Bengal, Punjab, Native States like Nepal, Central India, Central Provinces, Bombay and Madras and adds that others immigrating to British Guiana included speakers of Bengali, Assamese, Oriya, Rajasthani, Nepali, Punjabi, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu and perhaps a few other languages.

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