Was your family the Gafoors bankers like my family the Beharrys when they came to Guyana?    BANKERS BABY,BANKERS EH EH !!!!

Mitwah - my family are not the Gafoors or the Beharrys - but you came pretty close.  I have noticed your obsession with Pradoville mansions.  I can tell you this, if I was a President of a countrY for eleven years, I would build a nice house for myself too.  In the meantime, me glad you nah knoW where me live.

Lol.  I was amused too

Ah know they got lil good side,every one knows how they

build their empire by crookish means,good them r.a..s fall.

Another great attempt as meaningful conversation strangled by self important idiots.

As an East Indian I have always said the African Guyanese are our brothers and sisters. Wanting an independent country where the race, culture and religions of the East Indian people are not hated and not seen as backward/inferior is not about the hate of others.

Form Odeen's History of Guyana

As . . . the natives shall not be a burden to the colony in the event of their leaving their employment, one rupee per month shall be retained from the pay of each individual till there shall be sufficient sum to provide a passage for each to Calcutta, and should no such contingency take place, the money shall be restored at the end of five years.

Only the adult male immigrants – not the women and children – were bound by this five-year contract of indenture. Based on the contract, they received the following rate of pay:

Davidson, Barclay and Company, owners of Higbury and Waterloo estates in Berbice paid (per month) superintendents 24 guilders, headmen 10.10 guilders, labourers (men) 7.10 guilders, and boys 6 guilders. The other estates (in Demerara) paid superintendents 16 rupees, headmen 7 rupees, labourers (men) 5 rupees, and boys 4 rupees.

Not everyone who came to Guyana was poor.  My mother's grandfather came from the foothills of the Himalayas and was "rich" when he came to Guyana in the late 1800s.  After indentureship he bought a lot of property in  lower Berbice and was the first person to buy a car in Berbice.  That's what I was told.

How come you didn't include that there was massive taxation on items used by the Africans and that the sugar industry was exempt from much of these.  The over taxed Africans were therefore unable to maintain their villages and drainage systems.

 

So we have Africans taxed to import competitors for employment.  And their economic base being destroyed, rendering them more dependent on this employment.  The result being severe damage done to the Village Movement, which forced many Africans to seek other employment opportunities, mainly in the urban areas, or in the gold fields. 

 

And it established within the mindset of the African that risk was to be avoided, and that farming and small business activities engaged by them were doomed to fail.  Those Africans, who did attain upward mobility, had to abandon those occupations, and switch to the civil or social services to achieve this.

 

Learn to tell the whole story and stop implying that Indians were the only victims in this era.

Huh?  I addressed a specific point.  I am not here to regurgitate the history of Guyana.  You people have nuff time to fight about the same thing day in day out.

Of course, your usual focus on how uniquely beleaguered Indians are in Guyana.

 

 

Question for Mitwah. Why would you just want to be a koolie salt and rice in Guyana when you can be an East Indian in your own country. Is it because of some form of self-hate?

Why do you highlight indians as not hated and not everyone? Ask VJ if he did not write to the constitution commission with respect to the reforms addressing this question by fabricating institutional barriers. If memory serves me right I think he asked for direct representation and a bicameral system. I also wrote to them. We instead got a consolidation of the executive and an elected dictatorship based on race.

Dude, rich people did not enslave themselves.  Where is it you think of as "lower" Berbice? That always bother me. From Bolum to Mara?

What country is this banna?

He should move to India and try to claim that he is Indian.

In those days, Guyana was sold to the people in India as a land of opportunity.  I do not think indentureship was as bad in the late 1800s as it was for the initial batches.  Regardless, he came with wealth from India.  No he was not a Maharaja, but he was not poor.  He came to Guyana for the opportunity.

 

When I said lower Berbice I meant 69 and 70 villages that's where they settled.

After rolling in the ground with hysterical laughter they will take him to the mental asylum.

 

Italians laugh at Italian Americans when they claim to be Italian.  Ditto do the Irish at the Irish Americans. Africans laugh at blacks from the Americas when they play African.  And so do Indians at Caribbean Indians.  Hell they even laugh at their own US born kids, and call them ABCDs (American Born Confused Desis).

 

The Indo KKK look sad when they think that they can rebuild their Little India in Berbice.

 

What do they plan to do with the 65% of the Indian population who DO NOT live in Berbice. Or the 35% of the Berbice population which isn't African.

 

From what I recall that Hindu Muslim partitioning if India didn't work out too well.

An India man once told me that I know lots of things about his country and he knows nothing about my country. 

It was quite clear to all that those headed to Demerara were going to work in agriculture.  Given the caste system of India, why would people of higher caste migrate to a land where the jobs available to them were for people lower down the totem pole. 

 

In addition the rich, and presumably educated would have been fully aware of the conditions in Guyana.  They only had to see what was happening in Mauritius, Fiji, and South Africa to know. 

 

I can well imagine that the Caribbean got the most desperate bunch, due to its long distance from India, and the greater prospect of never returning.

 

A few might have gone, aiming to protect these people, put please don't pretend that hordes of rich people migrated.

 

In fact even the sugar barons who grew rich in Jamaica and Barbados usually arrived not that well off from the UK, and made their money in the colonies.

 

Wealthy people usually migrated in those days due to natural disaster, war, or some other calamity.  It wasn't like the maharajas were sending their sons to attend QC.

Well Guyanese know loads about Trinidad, while few Trinis have the slightest interest in Guyana.

So what if Italian laugh at Italian Americans? Italians laugh at themselves since they are a highly regional people. It does not mean they are not Italians. Same with Americans of Italian descent. They are of Italy, live by many of its belief systems and are an identifiable ethnicity even speaking their regional dialects.

 

Africa was never a country but tribal enclaves. Africans in the diaspora have lost  direct links but they know the general area where they are from. Some can even trace their family ties.

 

Modern Africa is being up rooted and dislocated. In the future when a Somalian in Kenya say he/she is Somalian do you not think they know what they are talking about?

 

I never met an american indian when I came north. In Canada, the Sioux, Blackfoot, Cree and Apache accepted me immediately as their people. Actually, that is the first time I heard the usage.. "he is people" when they introduce me to friends.

 

My kids call themselves Americans ( girls Indians as well)  and Guyanese and none of them ever saw the place or show a desire to go. They however lap up guyanese culture like it is candy. I hate chutney and I heard my son playing it, I asked him where he got it he said  his sister give it to him. I do not even think she has any guyanese friends except her cousins. And my son only listens to GoGo mostly...something regional only to DC. People are what they identify with not what others say they are or how others rationalize their creed

My Indian friend from New Delhi said the same,it has to do

with our inquiring minds.

You know full well that if your kids went to Guyana, they will be called "Yankee" or some other indicator of their foreignness.  They barely accept those of us who were bred and born there, but have migrated.

 

Italian Americans are NOT Italian.  They may keep certain aspects of Italian culture and traditions, and even that I doubt.  In the 30+ years that I have lived in the NY area I have seen a distinct decline in the degree to which Italian Americans differ from other whites. 

 

An Italian from Europe is immediately distinct from one from the USA, even those living in Italian American enclaves, where ethnic identities are still strong.

 

Africans accept me as a black man of African descent.  If I were to suggest that I am "African" that will generate some combination of pity or hilarity.  And not for the reasons that you suggest, as Africa itself is changing, and ethnic/tribal identities are way more complex than they used to be, as many become impacted by globalization, migration, and urbanization. 

 

But we do not even fit a GENERIC definition of being African.  This despite the fact that Africans recognize certain aspects of African culture among Caribbean blacks even more than we do.  So many things that I thought were just plain Caribbean turn out to have African origins.

 

Those Indigenous peoples accept you as a fellow Indigenous person.  If you told them that you were a Sioux, they would laugh at you.

When I was in Kolkata, I tried to find out about the indenture system to the colonies, but the average Indian seems interested only in finding food for the day and seem to care little about their history.

I guess, if they are elevated above their poverty, they might find other interest.

 

I now know about the indenture labourer monument, Ashook Ramsarran, GOPIO and other efforts to make this more visible.    

Its not THEIR history. Its YOURS.  They are still in India.

Again, identity is not what anyone defines you to be. It is what one defines themselves and where they feel a kinship and how they locate themselves in the world.

 

To the contrary. Native peoples do not have a word for ethnicity or race. They only have words for humans and for persons and that include other tribes also. In Oklahoma, they do identify themselves  with names plus tribe designation. I am sure it is because it became necessary to do so because of the way they were crammed together at the end of the long march. Also because tribal identity is money.

I do not grasp what you mean by the above. History comes into being as lives are displaced in time as on participates in  a social space.  Being in or out of India does not mean one can be dead to history.

So now, having been impacted by people from other races/ethnicities, the Indigenous peoples haven't developed a notion of people who are of a different tribe, but who they share something in common with that they don't with peoples who are alien to the Americas. 

 

 

Interesting.  I guess all of those Indigenous movements located throughout the Americas don't exist.  Clearly, though from very disparate cultures, they share something with each other, that must be based on some notion of ethnicity, or a socially constructed notion of race.

 

FACT.  One can identify with another group as much as one might wish, but if they don't accept you then you will never be part of them. In Queens large Indo Caribbean and Asian Indian communities exist.  Even in RH the Sikhs see NOTHING in common with Caribbean Indians, and keep their distance.

If Indians in GY are part of India. How could the indenture system not be part of India's history.

 

I thought history is events that occurred and not necessary right or wrong.

For example: Hitler tried to rule the world with racism. It might not be right, but its part of our history.    

Indenture pretty much defines lots of what Guyana, Suriname, and Trinidad are.

 

It does NOT define what India is. It is a mere dot in their history, and many other events have happened since that are radically more important.

 

Seriously, why should some one from India care about Guyana, a tiny nation thousands of miles away. 

 

  How many Guyanese Indians even know or care about Fiji, a society also heavily impacted by indenture?  Or even Mauritius, which is in many respects like Trinidad?

 

The fact that so many Guyanese Indians obsess about India doesn't mean that the feeling should be reciprocated.  When most Indians think about their diaspora, they think of the more recent migrations to North America and Europe. 

 

Even GOPIO has different classifications for those descended from indentures, than they do for those who reside overseas, but who maintain more direct contact with India.

let me reiterate, tribe has no boundaries. You simply have to undergo the initiation ceremony and you are one. The legal status of tribes is a white invention. In an effort to limit who can be located where and by that restrict  movement in reservations, they created the registration process. Tribe for a native person is about you and them being of one mind and agreeing to accept each other. Territory for them was where they live not some finite boundary since territories always overlap. Of course there are tribal differences and squabbles etc but the fluidity of tribal units has always been the norm. The idea of other accepting you because you have kinship connections or external identifiers is your conception not theirs. Simply hugging and saying you are my brother is satisfactory for most tribal cultures in north and south America.

Are you seen inferior or backward?

So why then did the various Amerindian groups all over the Americas fight those vicious wars, some to extinction, when all they had to do is have an initiation and convert.

 

That would have been a better end for a Taino, than being part of a ritualistic sacrifice when captured by a Carib.

you ask silly questions. Humans because of identity immediately create other than them. It does not mean that because they can easily exchange members the "otherness"status is obviated. It is about group formation for survival and often around kinship bands.

 

 Taino is just another word for amerindian not tribe. Luconos, Caribs Mesclados are all Taino by virtue of people claiming blood ties. No such tribe existed no less than any tribe calling themselves Amerindian or Native american. It has become an adopted term to apply to kinship and sense of belonging to the retribalization movement of people who know they have native blood and need an name. It is an umbrella term.

A 'dot in their history' is still their/our history.

You crowd your discussion with too many un-necessary examples.

This discussion about Guyana and India, no one else. 

 

Guyanese indenture labourers have a strong history with India and its a valid history, for Guyanese students to know.   

So you can use Arawak, because it was an established fact that there was one group (Caribs) which was chasing another (Arawak) and slaughtering many in the process.

 

This is a documented fact.  Proof was that in Carib islands men spoke one language, and women, another as Caribs killed the Arawak men, and forceably abducted Arawak women.

 

This sense of kinship of which you speak only began LONG AFTER all were dominated by the Europeans.  In fact the Aztecs and Incas were only defeated by the Spanish, because the subjugated Amerindian groups allied themselves against these dominant groups.  On their own the Spanish would have not had such an ability, with the few score men who were involved, and their complete isolation from their supply lines.

No group called themselves Arawak. That term was coined for groups of people speaking similar language variants. It means people of the long bow.Arawaks call themselves the people or Locono and their language Locono dian or people talk. Carib is a variant of Locono as are or Makouxi or Yanomamo etc. It is a foregone conclusion that these are one people differentiating due to isolation and inbreeding and clan formation from that perspective.   Whether Algonquin or Athabaskian or Quechua they are essentially the same people

 

You are missing the forest for the trees. You want to conflate tribe with ethnicity and tribe with blood kinship. I say while kinship predominates sin family is seminal to strong group formation, to belong to the tribe  was no biggie even if you are Ojibwa and the tribe accepting you is Oglala Lakota Sioux. Today blood descent or blood quantum is set per  rules because the US made it so as tribes are legal entities with entitlements and benefits. However, tribal people do not have exclusion rules as blacks have with respect to indian or the reverse. Even today one can get non voting/benefits membership by marrying into the tribe or otherwise included.  You also have the conquest theory wrong. In both south and central America. deception, torture, and blackmail were the tools employed in victory and not open warfare. The spanish could not win since the numbers were formidable. It was the same in North America.

It has also to do with size. India is a big land, a subcontinent. A regular babu from Haryana in north India knows little about Kerala in south India, so we cannot expect him to know much about little Guyana where less than 50 percent of the population are "Indians".

Are Guyana Indians from  India ?