EAST INDIANS: A
CALL FOR PLURALIST UNITY
By Prem Misir, Ph.D.
The distinctiveness
of East Indians
Participation
in the public service
Participation in
sugar and rice
Ethnic alliances
Ethnic similarities
Monday, May 5, 2003 symbolizes 165 years of the East Indian
presence in Guyana. As we partake in these glorious commemorative
activities, we need to engage in some serious reflections
on the cultural ‘oneness’ for which we strive
in Guyana. This ‘oneness’ may mean different
things to different people. Is this a ‘oneness’
that is created out of groups surrendering their culture
to a dominant group? Or is the fulfillment of this ‘oneness’
requires as its precondition the elimination of all cultures,
in order to give birth to brand new culture? And we also
may have to assess the amounts of similarities and differences
that exist among all ethnic groups in this country, in order
to work toward creating a ‘oneness’ that is
a win-win situation for all. But first, let’s focus
on the East Indian’s distinctiveness and their participation
levels in the society.
The
distinctiveness of East Indians
East Indians constitute more than half the population of
Guyana and more than a third of the people in Trinidad &
Tobago, yet they are perceived as distinctive. Naipaul captures
this exceptionality of the East Indian quite well when he
said that “…to be an Indian was to be distinctive.”
It is a distinctiveness that means something alien, something
different.
However, planters sought after this distinctiveness
in labor long before the slaves were freed. William Burnley,
a Trinidadian planter in 1814 saw the need for a distinct
group of laborers. Burnley felt that a new breed of laborers
must be “…healthy and free, with habits ready
formed, and sufficiently numerous to stand unsupported and
distinct from our present population on its immediate arrival.”
This distictiveness embraced not only the culture, but also
could be discerned through the conflict of interest between
the East Indian and African, from the beginning of indenture.
The East Indian entered the sugar plantation where the majority
of the labor was African. The East Indian was bounded through
contract to accept less pay than the African. This was the
genesis of the perceived African derision being heaped upon
the East Indian. This distinctiveness, in many ways, sustained
a division between the African and the East Indian. The
division was functional for the planters because it was
intended to prevent a cross-ethnic revolt.
The East Indian’s distinctiveness
produced numerous negative stereotypes held by both major
groups. The African saw the East Indian as mean and cunning,
and wanted to take over the country. On the other hand,
the East Indian perceived the African as thriftless and
irresponsible, with a contempt for the land, and taking
up a hedonistic way of life.
The distinctiveness of East Indians was
symbolized, too, through their supposed alien culture. Public
revenues, mainly custom dues, financed East Indian immigration
from India. Africans were not happy with this situation
and that is why they felt that this ‘alien’
culture was favored by White planters. An African organization
said in the early 1900s that “…the race to whose
detriment the coolies were being introduced were made to
contribute to the cost of a scheme of immigration designed
either to supplant the Negro or to coerce him into service
with the planters at a wage inadequate for his proper maintenance.”
This perception of the East Indian’s favored alien
culture provided the genesis of ethnic insecurities between
these two groups; these insecurities, indeed, have negatively
impacted East Indian participation in the society at different
moments of this country’s history. These insecurities,
in a large way, have not only impacted the East Indian experience
in Guyana, but may have very well become part of this ethnic
group’s way of life today.
Participation
in the public service
In order to improve race and ethnic relations, we need to
assimilate and understand the comprehensive features of
this East Indian experience, including ethnic insecurities.
Some of these may very well be dislocation from India, massive
burden of labor in the Caribbean, ethnic victimization in
the post-colonial era, and migration to the metropolitan
centers. These characteristics generate a double marginalization,
as Naipaul would say (Birbalsingh 1997: xv). First, there
is marginalization via their relationship to a subservient
American and Euro-centered Creole-Caribbean condition. Second,
there is marginalization via their ‘outsider’
status as East Indians in the Caribbean. This dual marginalization
was evidenced by data presented by Dwarka Nath. According
to Nath, up to 1921, East Indians achieved very little.
In 1931, East Indians comprised 42% of the population but
included only 8% of public servants and only 7% of teachers
were of East Indian ethnicity. However, this marginalization
did not end in 1931.
The findings of a study on East Indians in the Caribbean
showed that East Indian participation in the public sector
suffered considerably during the PNC rule. In the late 1970s,
participation of East Indians in the public service was
far from spectacular. With 29 Ministers, seven were East
Indians and 20 were Africans. There were 29 Permanent Secretaries,
with 2 East Indians and 25 Africans. Heads of Personnel
Departments were classified as five East Indians and 17
as Africans. Among the 139 Heads of Divisions within Ministries,
there were 19 East Indians and 102 Africans. All nine heads
of higher institutions of learning were Africans. Four out
of five multilateral schools had African heads and no East
Indian as a head. With 25 community high school heads, five
were East Indians and 19 were Africans. Fourteen Africans
and six East Indians constituted the ethnic composition
of education officers.
Today, while this discriminatory situation
in the public sector largely has been eroded, the participation
of East Indians in some critical areas still needs to be
addressed. The University of Guyana has 40 East Indian Faculty
members compared to 140 African Faculty members in the Faculties
of Agriculture, Arts, Education, Health, Natural Sciences,
Social Sciences, and Technology.
Most Heads are Africans in all three types
of school – nursery, elementary, and high. Only in
elementary schools do East Indians show some competitiveness
with Africans for Headships. In the People’s National
Congress (PNC) Administration, it was not unusual to find
on average that 70 percent of the Regional Education Officers
(REDOs) were Africans. Today, the ethnic imbalance has been
narrowed to the point where about 50% of REDOs are Africans,
followed by East Indians with 40%.
East Indians predominate in the senior
positions of School Heads and Deputy School Heads only in
Regions 2 and 3. Africans occupy these positions in Regions
4 through 10. The magnitude of Africans in these senior
positions, therefore, is higher than that of East Indians.
Some schools only have an Acting Deputy Head partly because
currently no Teaching Service Commission exists.
Most school heads in Regions 2, 3, and
6 are East Indians, while the majority of school heads in
Regions 4, 5, and 10 are Africans. East Indian school heads
are found in the largest majority in Regions 2 and 3. African
school heads predominate in Regions 4 and 5.
Paradoxically, education once covertly
denied to East Indians, subsequently, became the instrument
of social mobility for them on a grand scale, especially
in the medical and legal professions. For instance, today,
Guyana has 295 medical practitioners, 148 (50.2%) are East
Indians, 107 (36.2%) Africans, and 40 (13.6%) Others. Among
the 50 Medex personnel, 21 (42%) are East Indians, 26 (56%)
Africans, and 1 (2%) Others. Among the 9 Sick Nurses/Dispensers,
5 (55.6%) are East Indians and 4 (44.4%) Africans. With
8 Optometrists, 3 (37.5%) are East Indians, 3 (37.5%) Africans
and 2 (25%) Others. Judgeships of East Indian and African
ethnicity are shared equally between the two groups. Among
Magistrates, 2 (27%) are East Indians, 8 (72%) Africans,
and 1 (1%) Others.
Compare the current situation with 1926
when only 9% of the medical practitioners were East Indians
and in the period 1906 through 1925 when a mere 21% of barristers
and solicitors were East Indians. This atrophy impacting
East Indian participation in the public service in the early
years after indentureship, also, characterized their involvement
in the sugar and rice industries.
Participation
in sugar and rice
The East Indian domination of the labor market on the sugar
plantations was secured through public revenues used to
finance East Indian immigration. By the end of the 19th
century, the sugar industry was totally dependent upon East
Indian labor. African exodus from the sugar estates also
facilitated East Indian dominance in sugar. Today, their
dominance in sugar is still felt. In 2002, sugar export
earnings totaled $22,405,873 billion.
This dominance in sugar later evolved into
developing the rice industry. It first started with East
Indians utilizing land leased on the abandoned sugar estates
coupled with their acceptance of small plots of land at
the end of their indenture contract, an offer intended to
lure them to remain in the then British Guiana. By 1931,
the acreage cultivated in paddy superseded the area planted
under cane.
By 1964, the new PNC/UF Government abandoned
the PPP’s program for the rice industry that started
in 1957, a program that provided enormous gains for rice
farmers. East Indians believe that this new program discriminated
against them. After 1964, there was a reduction in the guaranteed
prices for rice purchased by the Rice Marketing Board. Considerable
financial losses also bedeviled the rice industry. The Rice
Marketing Board reported losses of $4.3 million in 1964/65
and $2.8 million in 1965/66. Compare the profits of $839,734,
$613,055, and $98,906 made in 1961/62, 1962/63, and 1963/64,
respectively, during the years of the PPP Administration.
Rice lands under cultivation increased from 136,990 acres
in 1957 to 316,000 acres in 1964, and declined to 242,277
acres in 1970. In 2002, rice export earnings totaled $8,501,691
billion. These atrophies impacting East Indian participation
in both the public service and in sugar and rice, also,
were contoured with ethnic alliances.
Ethnic
alliances
A history of humiliation and some similarity of social and
economic conditions for both African slaves and East Indian
indentureds on the sugar plantations, force the conclusion
that slavery and indentureship were the same phenomenon
(Cross 1980:4; Rodney 1979:36-39). This similarity sowed
the seeds of subsequent ethnic alliances.
As with Africans under slavery, East Indians
lived on the sugar estates within a framework that could
very well be referred to as a total institution. Generally,
a total institution pertains to environments such as prisons
or mental hospitals, in which the participants are physically
and socially isolated from the outside world (Tischler 1999:127).
It`s remarkable that the East Indian way of life was not
significantly impacted by a total institutional framework
that invariably produces resocialization, intended to eliminate
a person’s culture. Cultural similarity, especially
in language and religion, among East Indian indentureds,
could explain the minimal impact on their lives in a total
institution. Keep in mind that by the beginning of the twentieth
century, about three-quarters of East Indians in Guyana
(then British Guiana) came from Uttar Pradesh in India.
This ‘total institution’ lifestyle experienced
by East Indians during indentureship, induced a forced type
of ethnic cleavage whereby there was minimal social interaction
between Africans and East Indians.
The years, however, after indentureship from 1917 through
the 1950s, witnessed significant ethnic alliances between
the major ethnic groups (Africans and East Indians), not
only at the marketplace, but also in the political domain.
Their early comparable experience during slavery and indentureship,
notwithstanding a conflict of interest birthed through East
Indian inclusion on the plantations, created the threshold
for this union. During this period, too, many interest groups
were formed, including the People’s Progressive Party,
and the trade union movement in Guyana, among others; in
Trinidad and Tobago, Captain A.A. Cipriani took over the
leadership of the Working Men’s Association to promote
social and constitutional reform for the working class of
all ethnic groups; in T&T, again, note the workers`
hunger march led by Uriah ‘Buzz’ Butler from
Fyzabad to Port of Spain in 1935. Adrian Cola Rienzi founded
and was President of two powerful unions – Oilfield
Workers Trade Union, and the All Trinidad Sugar Estates
and Factory Workers Trade Union. These were really serious
attempts in T&T to unite the working class across ethnic
lines.
In this era, as can be observed, some multiethnic
mobilization to stave off colonial hegemony, occurred, first,
between Africans and Creoles, to be joined subsequently
by East Indians. Ethnic cleavage while then still a latent
characteristic in the societal framework, was not a major
driving force in institutional development, at least from
1917 through the early 1950s. The pursuit of a common goal
to destabilizing colonial hegemony may have reduced any
serious manifestations and consequences of ethnic cleavage
in this period.
As mentioned earlier, Guyanese history
is not inundated with racial conflict but ethnic alliances.
But some politicians want us to believe that ethnic conflict
pervades this land. Rodney makes the point that the case
advanced of highly prevalent racial conflict in the society
is inaccurate.
This is what he has to say:
…my contention is that the case for the dominant role
of racial division in the historical sphere has been overstated,
and that scholarship on the subject has accepted without
due scrutiny the proposition that Indians and Africans existed
in mutually exclusive compartments. The problems of interpretation
lie not only in the marshalling of the evidence, but, more
fundamentally, in the historical methodology that is applied
(Rodney1982:188).
Let us now look at a few facts supporting this notion
that Guyana’s history is not ridden with racial conflict.
1). The Commonwealth Commission
commenting on the disturbances in 1962 : “We found
little evidence of any racial segregation in the social
life of the country…East Indians and Africans seemed
to mix and associate with one another on terms of the greatest
cordiality…”
2).There is the alliance between East Indians
and Africans under Critchlow’s leadership in the fight
for better wages, and an 8-hour working day.
3). The union of ethnic forces against
colonial hegemony is another case in point, e.g., the frequent
criticisms launched by the Indian Opinion, the organ of
the British Guiana East Indian Association, against the
colonial government; Africans challenging the anti-education
principles of the 1876 Education law; the demand for Indian
languages to be introduced in schools; and the Court of
Policy comprising members from many ethnic groups made crown
lands available to both East Indians and Africans.
4).The emergence of institutional working-class
unity in 1946 that became solidified in 1950 with the formation
of the People’s Progressive Party and manifested by
its victory at the 1953 polls.
5). H.J.M. Hubbard, a trade unionist in
addressing whether Guyana is ridden with racial conflict
said: “It is by any standards a remarkable fact that
in a competitive semi-feudal society such as British Guiana
with restricted social and economic opportunities and less
jobs than potential workers, very few serious physical inter-racial
conflicts arose between the ethnic groups constituting the
population” (Hubbard 1969:27).
However, at the threshold of the White
colonialists’ departure from the Colonies, that is,
from the 1950s to the present, saw ethnic competition between
the major ethnic groups to fill the power vacuum and secure
the legal-political stage. The ethnic division arising out
of this ethnic competition was intentional and a subterfuge
used by some politicians to secure political advantage along
ethnic lines. That is, it is an invented racial antagonism
not rooted in sustained racial and ethnic hatred, but political
deceit.
This deception and pretense whereby racial
conflict is presented as afflicting the total society, has
had its institutional origins in the early 1950s. The split
within the PPP in 1955 struck a blow to East Indian and
African working-class unity. The unity became further strained
following the People’s National Congress (PNC) loss
in 1957. Dr. Jagan in his West On Trial earmarked 1957 PNC’s
defeat as the beginnings of racial party politics.
Ethnic
similarities
The difficulty in ethnic and race relations is that we tend
to focus a lot more on the differences among us, and de-emphasize
the similarities. If a person goes to a restaurant and observes
an East Indian man sitting at a table with a non-Indian
woman, that person immediately begins to wonder as to how
an East Indian would be able to cope with this non-Indian.
The person then starts to concoct all the negative stereotypes,
associated with differences between them.
Yes, there are the manifest differences,
such as, differences in culture. But if you write down the
similarities and differences between the two ethnic groups,
then in most cases, the similarities would outweigh the
differences. Therefore, it is very significant that the
education system in Guyana develops methods to disseminate
ethnic similarities. Even the University of Guyana has not
made enormous strides in this cultural dissemination process
through engaging projects focusing on ethnic similarities.
We need to make a special effort to relate to people who
are different from us, even if they have a hard time interacting
with us. We need to take that first step.
The obsession with ethnic differences and
not similarities has driven people to believe that in Guyana
as in all multiethnic societies, the achievement of a common
culture or a common value system is the panacea for resolving
race problems. Nothing can be further from the truth. The
U.S. with a multiplicity of cultures, and it has a lot more
than six, does not appear to have a common culture. People
who are naturalized American citizens or Green Card holders
in the U.S. generally comply with the legal requirements
of the system, and still sustain their own cultural heritage
and contribute to nation building of that society. Pluralism
characterizes the culture in the U.S. A pluralistic society
as the U.S. is a society that is comprised of many different
ethnic groups. Anything other than pluralism may involve
people assimilating another’s culture or diluting
one’s own culture.
Where one group’s culture dominates
a politically subordinate group’s culture to the point
of eliminating the minority cultures constitutes a case
of assimilation. This is a situation where the minority
group divests itself of its own cultural make-up to take
on the culture of the dominant group. Theoretically, in
the Guyana situation, assimilation would involve East Indian
people stripping themselves of their East Indianness to
take on Africanness if that characteristic lies within the
dominant group, or vice versa. Assimilation, however, can
be ‘forced’ or ‘voluntary’.
Forced assimilation has not worked historically
as we have seen in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Slovenia,
Kosova, and at different points in Guyana’s history.
As previously indicated, a false focus is used to promote
assimilation toward creating a common culture, since some
people believe that this focus can reconcile ethnic differences.
We must consider that appeals for national unity by dubious
political leaders, invariably, have been structured on the
basis of only the dominant ethnic group’s culture.
However, a spotlight on ethnic similarities, even in the
case of both East Indians and Africans, historically, has
preserved and advanced each other’s culture. All ethnic
groups here have to reduce their focus on differences, and
picture the bridges, the coalitions they could form with
their similarities.
We must respect other people’s
culture, and understand that the cultures of the Amerindians,
East Indians, Portuguese, Chinese, Africans, Mixed, can
coexist. It is futile to bridge cultures, for cultures
cannot be bridged. Would any ethnic group want to concede
slices of its culture to a dominant group, where all these
slices would together constitute an absurd ‘Guyanese
culture’? These slices would not be given, and they
are not necessary because this ill-conceived ‘Guyanese
culture’ presupposes a condition of forced assimilation,
manifest or latent, on minority groups by any dominant group.
Cultures in Guyana do not have to be fragmented or diluted;
these cultures have to coexist, for only relationships premised
on ethnic similarities can be bridged. Only in this scenario
would we have a Guyanese culture characterized by some form
of pluralism. This is pluralist unity in all its glory.
Guyanese should not accept anything less.
However, East Indian culture is still a
far cry from being established as a valid field of study
because the Caribbean is still seen as African. Numerous
studies of African Caribbean history and culture attest
to this definitive conclusion. These studies show an Afro-centric
approach toward the Caribbean. Given a sizable number of
East Indians in Guyana, the notion and application of an
Afro-centric philosophy entrenched in Caribbean Studies
certainly dilutes the significance of East Indian labor
in Guyana from the beginning of indenture. East Indian culture
incorporated in a sustained and holistic tertiary education
program will promote pluralist unity. It would be disingenuous
for anyone to suggest that East Indian culture already is
comprehensively infused in the higher education curriculum
and in other significant institutions, for we now are witnessing
a progressive decline in this culture that previously sustained
the Indian connection and preserve the Indian identity.
East Indian culture must equally coexist with other cultures
at all levels. East Indians must demand this equal coexistence.
TOP
